Top Carolyn Parkhurst Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Carolyn Parkhurst Biography

Carolyn Parkhurst (born January 18, 1971, Manchester, New Hampshire) is an American author who has published five books. Her first, the 2003 best-seller The Dogs of Babel also known as Lorelei's Secret in the UK, was a New York Times Notable Book and on the New York Times Best Seller List.

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Carolyn Parkhurst Quotes

You wake up and you feel - what? Heaviness, an ache inside, a weight, yes. A soft crumpling of the flesh. A feeling like all the surfaces inside you have been rubbed raw. A voice in your head - no, not voices, not like hearing voices, nothing that crazy, just your own inner voice, the one that says 'Turn left at the corner' or 'Don't forget to stop at the post office,' only now it's saying, 'I hate myself. ' It's saying, 'I want to die. '

Crazy, Crumpling, Hate, Head, Suicide, Yes

I sing of a woman with ink on her hands and pictures hidden beneath her hair. I sing of a dog with skin like velvet pushed the wrong way. I sing of the shape a fallen body makes in the dirt beneath a tree, and I sing of an ordinary man who is wanted to know things no human being could tell him. This is the true beginning.

Body, Dog, Hair, Men, Pictures

Sometimes I wonder how we can be so sure what it is God sees. How arrogant we are, I sometimes think, to imagine there's someone watching us every minute. To think our every action matters that much.

Arrogant, Imagine, Matter, Matters, Sees, Thinking

It's not the content of our dreams that gives our second heart its dark color; it's the thoughts that go through our heads in those wakeful moments when sleep won't come. And those are the things we never tell anyone at all.

Color, Dark, Dream, Heart, Sleep

Washing the Dead is an illuminating and intricately layered novel about the complicated legacies that pass from mother to daughter, and about the ways that understanding our own history helps make us who we are. Michelle Brafman is an insightful writer who never falters or flinches in her quest to uncover the hearts of her characters.

Character, Heart, Helps, Intricately, Mother Daughter, Quest

It was September, and there was a crackly feeling to the air. I was saying something that was making her laugh, and I couldn't stop looking at her. It was a little bit chilly, and her cheeks were pink, and her dark hair was flowing around her face. All I wanted for the rest of my life was to keep making her laugh like that. Sometimes our arms brushed against each other as we walked, and it was like I could feel the touch for minutes after it happened.

Arms, Dark, Flowing, Hair, Laughing, Saying

It's true, isn't it, that each of us has two hearts? The secret heart, curled behind like a fist, living gnarled and shrunken beneath the plain, open one we use every day.

Heart, Hearts, Living, Secret, True, Two

I wake up in that state of grief when you can tell you've been mourning even in your sleep.

Grief, Mourning, Sleep, State

I've always known that the best part of writing occurs before you've picked up a pen. When a story exists only in your mind, its potential is infinite; it's only when you start pinning words to paper that it becomes less than perfect. You have to make your choices, set your limits. Start whittling away at the cosmos, and don't stop until you've narrowed it down to a single, ordinary speck of dirt. And in the end, what you've made is not nearly as glorious as what you've thrown away.

Choices, Glorious, Known, Perfect, Story, Writing

The conclusion I have reached is that, above all, dogs are witnesses.

Conclusion, Dog, Dogs, Feuds, Reached

It's gratifying to know that you've appeared in someone else's dreams. It's proof that you exist, in a way, proof that you have substance and value outside the walls of your own mind.

Dream, Gratifying, Know, Mind, Proof, Wall

There's no book that absolutely everyone loves.

Book, Everyone, Loves, One Love

All this to say: I am forty-three years old. I may yet live another forty. What do I do with those years? How do I fill them without Lexy? When I come to tell the story of my life, there will be a line, creased and blurred and soft with age, where she stops. If I win the lottery, if I father a child, if I lose the use of my legs, it will be after she has finished knowing me. "When I get to Heaven", my grandmother used to say, widowed at thirty-nine, "your grandfather won't even recognize me.

Children, Father, Grandmother, Lottery, Recognize, Stops

There would be hard times, but what did I care if we had hard times? The branches of my love were wide, and they caught the rain and the snow. We would be okay, the two of us together. We would be okay.

Caught, Hard Times, Okay, Rain, Snow, Two

For so long, it was just my secret. It burned inside me, and I felt like I was carrying something important, something that made me who I was and made me different from everybody else. I took it with me everywhere, and there was never a moment when I wasn't aware of it. It was like I was totally awake, like I could feel every nerve ending in my body. Sometimes my skin would almost hurt from the force of it, that's how strong it was. Like my whole body was buzzing or something. I felt almost, I don't know, noble, like a medieval knight or something, carrying this secret love around with me.

Force, Hurt, Knights, Love, Noble, Strong

Perhaps she saw before her a lifetime of walking on the ruined earth and chose instead a single moment in the air.

Air, Earth, Instead, Saw, Saws