Bertino And Bertino Quotes & Sayings

That they can really haul is what most people don't know about wild turkeys. — 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

Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it. — William Ellery Channing

You can't say you know a city unless you know three ways to everywhere. — 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

Seeing his face after months was as immediate as a pointed gun. — Marie-Helene Bertino

The mark of writing on me is so indelible, a tattoo would be redundant. — 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

You just have to press the right keys and the right pedals at the right time and the music plays itself. — Johann Sebastian Bach

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

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

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

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

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 I were but mere dust and ashes I might speak unto the Lord, for the Lord's hand made me of this dust, and the Lord's hand shall re-collect these ashes; the Lord's hand was the wheel upon which this vessel of clay was framed, and the Lord's hand is the urn in which these ashes shall be preserved. I am the dust and the ashes of the temple of the Holy Ghost, and what marble is so precious? But I am more than dust and ashes: I am my best part, I am my soul. And being so, the breath of God, I may breathe back these pious expostulations to my God: — John Donne

Good morning, the city says. Fuck you. — 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

Do it. Go there. Take it away, permanently. Deliver the fear. Force the task. Remove all hope. Demand the sacrifice. Enact defeat. Wreck everything. Great endings are built of great climaxes: enormous feats, worst fears, tremendous losses, harrowing sacrifices, utter destruction. — Donald Maass

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

I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism. — Terence McKenna

To live without having a Cicero and a Tacitus at hand seems to me as if it was aprivation of one of my limbs. — John Quincy Adams

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