I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories
Laura van den Berg
Top 10 Best Quotes
“The big alone," he said. "That's all any of us has in the end. Nothing can protect us from it, not careers or children or spouses or money or lovers.”
“She told us that evil rarely looked like evil when it first arrived. It could look like innovation and progress and prosperity, courage even, but more than anything it looked, to some, like a solution—a solution to the secret problem they believed had gone too long unaddressed. They felt as though they had been speaking a hidden language among themselves, and then a man or a woman in a suit stood on a stage and addressed cheering masses in that very same language, hidden no longer.”
“She was always telling people to shut the fuck up. It was a term of endearment.”
“Intimacy could distort one's vantage, that much was true. Sometimes trying to see the whole of a person could be like describing a painting with your nose pressed to the canvas, though my husband would have argued that I hadn't wanted to see from a different angle, hadn't wanted to step back.”
“I wondered if God found people like me annoying, those who turned to prayer only when they were neck-deep, that terrible friend we've all had.”
“All this disappointment was, I felt, intensified by the terrible movements in our world. There has never been a worse time to be a bystander, to be the person who says, That was taken out of context, or, There are always two sides, or, We don't yet know the whole story.”
“...this is the problem with translating experience into fiction, the way certain truths read like lies.”
“What's one small thing you could do today to better your life?" I will ask a woman who calls the helpline one afternoon, picking from a list the workshop leader provided. "If I could answer that question do you really think I'd be calling this stupid number?" the woman will say back.”
“This is the problem with the gig economy, I think as I squirm around in the trunk. Everyone is so vulnerable and the rules for what constitutes civilized behavior--well, they're coming apart so quickly I've decided those rules were illusions all along. We have stopped seeing each other as people, as fellow travelers on this dying earth; we just see a gig or an economy.... The system is designed to keep us so depleted that we forget our sense of decency and become so mercenary about our own survival that we have nothing left to contribute to the common good.”
“There are people who defuse and people who detonate, people who make a mistake and instead of fixing it say: watch me be worse than you could have ever imagined. I put my elbows on the table. I smiled with my teeth.”
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Book Keywords:
aloneness, common-good, lies, life, challenges, vulnerability, contractors, understanding, decency, work, knowing-someone, truth, loneliness, neutrality, both-sides, helplines, disappointment, god, freelancers, endearment, solitude, fiction, shut-up, empathy, annoyance, desperation, prayer, change, relationships, distortion, depletion, isolation, experience, knowledge, shutting-up, help, phone-calls, gig-economy, seeing-both-sides, intimacy, shades-of-gray
