Marie-Helene Bertino Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 23 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Marie-Helene Bertino.
Famous Quotes By Marie-Helene Bertino
Once in a while, I smell Clive on my skin and it stops my day. It's a train crossing; I wait to pass. Eventually the lights stop flashing, the barriers lift. I keep moving. — Marie-Helene Bertino
She is officiating the marriage of two bottles of ketchup; overturning one and balancing it on the mouth of the other so it can empty its shit. The — Marie-Helene Bertino
If you are anything other than humbled in the presence of love, you are not in the presence of love. — Marie-Helene Bertino
Music fills the space between them. Mark wants to take the pill that keeps him awake, but not in front of his daughter. Instead, he flirts. "There's a lot of trouble with a brown-eyed handsome man. In your travels have you found this to be true?"
This is Madeleine's favorite game. His role is to ask silly questions and hers is to answer as if he is serious, neither one acknowledging the other conversation that goes on wordlessly around them, in which some other, better version of themselves say: Isn't it nice to be father and daughter? — Marie-Helene Bertino
In the jaundiced light of a streetlamp, Sarina realizes why people have children: to see the face of the one they love at the ages they've missed ... — Marie-Helene Bertino
Good morning, the city says. Fuck you. — Marie-Helene Bertino
Tonight, the Sisters of Saint Joseph and I are going to The Slaughterhouse Bar. I have four rolls of quarters and we are going to dance until there's blood in our slippers. — Marie-Helene Bertino
If there were a race among all artists to the human heart, my money would be on music to win. It knows a shortcut. — Marie-Helene Bertino
He had always listened to the music of a more sensitive man. She had let several relationship cruelties slide because of it. — Marie-Helene Bertino
When you're alone, you are in the right place to watch sadness approach like storm clouds over an open field. You can sit in a chair and get ready for it. As it moves through you, you can reach out your hands and feel all the edges. When it passes and you can drink coffee again you even miss it because it has been loyal to you like a boyfriend. — Marie-Helene Bertino
That's a drummer's love story. If you want a prettier one, you'll be waiting forever. If you could separate your body into four distinct rhythms, you'd be cracked too — Marie-Helene Bertino
They hurt me, these small, brutal kindnesses. — Marie-Helene Bertino
A monkey could do my job better and with more hilarious results. — Marie-Helene Bertino
Maybe God gets nervous in places like this, the way I feel in restaurants with linen napkins, because if he does exist, I don't feel him here. — Marie-Helene Bertino
The trash bags are gone, the bar wiped clean. The lights have been hung; they line the stage and loop around the Snakehead, making the old axe glow. Stalled in the doorway, Lorca experiences a stomachache he can only call Christmas. — Marie-Helene Bertino
Thinking about him requires so little effort that she can do it while performing mindless activities. Soaping the dishes, replaiting Clare Kelley's hair, drying the dishes. The part of her brain that plays his ongoing reel is unconnected to the neurons and synapses that control things like conscious thought and logic. Ben turning to her at a party. Ben turning to her. Ben turning. What human being deserves to be the nucleus of such high esteem? Certainly not Benjamin, middle name Hal, last name Allen. Five-nine in boots. Who has a car that doesn't start on cold mornings, an unfinished screenplay, a law degree he doesn't use, a romantic's tendency to save movie stubs, and a mannered, unsmiling wife. — Marie-Helene Bertino
We carry our ancestors in our names and sometimes we carry our ancestors through the sliding doors of emergency rooms and either way they are heavy, man, either way we can't escape. — Marie-Helene Bertino
Marcel was from Louisiana, so for four years Emily had been southern by association. She insisted on Lynchburg Lemonades. She scheduled interviews around the Gators. She championed gentility. Anyone at a dinner party who thought they could tell a joke making fun of the region encountered a faceful of Emily, quick and ferocious as a convert, as a woman who loved a man.
Emily now had no claim to the South. The region and its interests would proceed without her. — Marie-Helene Bertino
That can be the cruelest part of happiness--its tendency to disguise itself in boredom."
- Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses, title story — Marie-Helene Bertino