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Bowlaway

Elizabeth McCracken

Top 10 Best Quotes

“...grief looks like nothing from the outside, it looks like surrender, but in fact it is the most terrible struggle. It is friction. It is a spiritual grinding, and who's to say it cannot produce a spark and heat that, given fuel could burn a good man to the ground.”

“In the mornings he would walk…. At the start of a walk, alone or moving, the sun at his back or cold rain down his collar, he was more himself than under any other circumstance, until he had walked so far he was not himself, not a self, but joined to the world. Invisibly joined. Had a religion been founded on this, purely this, he would have converted….. Proof of God? Proof was in the world, and the way you visited the world was on foot…. Your walking was a devotion.”

“She believed in God for the same reason anybody does: it is unbearable to think that our private thoughts are truly private.”

“Maybe better that way, to not know our parents, to love them as we move away from them--they're on the shore and we're on a ship, moving away; later we will switch places as they sail away from us, and we say to them, a little longer.”

“We have, all of us, invented things that others have beat us to: walking upright, a certain sort of sandwich involving avocado and an onion roll, a minty sweet cocktail, ourselves, romantic love, human life.”

“No generation is ever spontaneous. We are none of us our own kind.”

“It was tempting to believe that if you made yourself small and light, beneath notice, you might be allowed to persist nearly anywhere. But meek women were tossed out and forgotten: that was something she had learned from Bertha Truitt herself. What women needed to do was take up space. Become unbudgeable.”

“Everybody on this earth was born,” he said. “It’s the one thing we all have in common.”

“When he was a young man the mysteries of the world seemed like generosity--you can think anything you want! Now the universe withheld things. It was like luck. Luck once meant anything could happen. Now it meant he was doomed. But maybe it didn't need to.”

“What she wanted was a kind of greatness that women were not allowed ...”

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Book Keywords:

women, walking, universe, experience, mystery-of-life, feminism, connection, spirituality, life, luck, devotion, parents-and-children

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