Top 33 Elizabeth McCracken Quotes

When you‘ve lost a baby, everyone around you expects you to be fine once the new baby is born, as though that somehow takes away the pain of losing the first child. I needed to express how wrong that was.

Life likes jokes; life is constantly making jokes, even at the most inopportune moments.

In library science school, back in the years of glowing green non-graphical screens and protocols called Archie and Veronica, I wrote Internet documentation.

It’s hard to know which made me more aware of the impossibility of protecting children – having a child die or having had two live.

Acknowledgment of grief – well, it makes feeling the grief easier, not harder.

Revising stuff lately, I was shocked to see how often my characters scratched their ankles, felt their feet, and touched their own ears.

There are two MFA programs here at the University of Texas, and I read on the jury of both of them. And it’s amazing to me how many really talented young writers seem to fear humor.

Some graphic narrative art presses against the panel: you wrestle with it at the level of the paper.

In ‘Property,’ none of the characters are based on any real people, but the house is very much the house that I moved into in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

There was a time in my life when I wasn’t sure I’d ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person’s form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.

Vilnius was once known as ‘The Jerusalem of Lithuania’ because of the number of prayer houses and scholars there; in the first half of the 20th century, it became a center of Yiddish-language scholarship.

I can’t imagine not joking even at the worst of times. And for me, it’s sort of automatic.

In general, I think people are worried about saying the wrong thing to any grieving person. On a very basic level, I think they’re frightened of touching off tears or sorrow, as though someone tearing up at the mention of unhappy news would be the mentioner’s fault.

Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

I work in my office on the campus of the University of Texas. It’s the sort of place described as ‘book-lined’, but it’s recently tipped over into ‘fire-hazard’ territory.

I have been the person who tries to keep conversation light while talking to someone whose heart has been smashed.

Tweeting about objects means I don’t need to bid on them, which is a blessing. Buying something is a way of saying, ‘Look at this!’ So is tweeting. So, I guess, is writing fiction.

I used to be a writer with superstitions worthy of a professional baseball player: I needed a certain desk chair and a certain armchair and a certain desk arrangement, and I could only get really useful work done between 8 P.M. and 3 A.M. Then I started to move, and I couldn’t bring my chairs with me.

I have a memory of my fourth-grade self wanting to be the first woman president of the United States, but I think that has a lot more to do with my love of world records and reference books than a love of serving my country.

I’m astounded by people who can listen to music when they write. I can only assume that they have multi-track brains, while mine is decidedly single.

There were a lot of things I loved about working in a library, but mostly I miss the library patrons. I love books, but books are everywhere. Library patrons are as various and oddball and democratic as library books.

When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn’t go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was.

You write the way you think about the world. My motto in times of trouble – and I’m speaking of life, not writing – is ‘no humor too black.’

When it comes to other people’s writing, my older influences are more powerful than more recent ones, partially because I’m now more worried that I’ll suddenly accidentally steal something from another writer.

I’m a higgledy-piggledy person in every way. On days that I work, I work for eight hours in a row, with my internet access entirely turned off, locked in my office.

I always want the last line to be really good, which may sound silly, but I want it to be a last pleasing line.

In the last century, I earned my living as a librarian, and I loved it. I’d have to take some classes to get up to speed with 21st-century librarianship.

I feel like I don’t understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all.

I’ve always been absolutely appalling about the future, but I sort of think that was my childhood religion. We were future deniers. You did your best in the present, which was all around you.

I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story.

It’s an amazing thing to watch a lizard fold a moth into its mouth, like a sword swallower who specialises in umbrellas.

The walls of the Franciscan Church of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Mary were ruined stucco chipping away from the brick underneath, with ghostly frescoes, concrete-filled niches, and one complete, vivid crucifix painted over the altar.

You believe in God or statistics or the way your narrative differs from other people.