Quotes from A Reliable Wife

“Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“If love drove people mad, what would lack of love do?”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“Catherine Land liked the beginnings of things. The pure white possibility of the empty room, the first kiss, the first swipe at larceny. And endings, she liked endings, too. The drama of the smashing glass, the dead bird, the tearful goodbye, the last awful word which could never be unsaid or unremembered.
It was the middles that gave her pause. This, for all its forward momentum, this was a middle. The beginnings were sweet, the endings usually bitter, but the middles were only the tightrope you walked between the one and the other. No more than that.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“She believed in the miraculous. Or she had, until she reached an age when, all of a sudden, she realized that the life she was living, was in fact, her life. The clay of her being, so long infinitely malleable, had been formed, hardened into what now seemed a palpable, unchanging object. A shell she inhabited. It shocked her then. It shocked her now, like a slap in the face. ”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“... It was a story of people who don't choose life over death until it's too late to know the difference, people whose goodness is forgotten, left behind like a child's toy in a dusty playroom, people who see many things and remember only a handful of the them and learn from even fewer, people who hurt themselves, who wreck their own lives and then go on to wreck the lives of those around them, who cannot be helped or assuaged by love or kindness or luck or charm, who forget kindness, the feeling and practice of it, and how it can save even the worst, most misshapen life from despair. It was just a story about despair.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“Standing in the center of the crowd, his solitude was enormous. He felt that in all the vast and frozen space in which he lived his life - every hand needy, every heart wanting something from him - everybody had a reason to be and a place to land. Everybody but him. For him there was nothing. In all the cold and bitter world, there was not a single place for him to sit down.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“Sometime, Mrs. Truitt, we work very hard at something, we exhaust ourselves to accomplish something which seems vital to us." He chose his words with care. "Our best hope for happiness. And sometimes we find that thing, only to find it has simply not been worth the effort.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“Sometimes she sat and let her mind go blank and her eyes go out of focus, so that she watched the slow, jerky movements of the motes that floated across her pupils. They amazed her as a child. Now she saw them as a reflection of how she moved, floating listlessly through the world, occasionally bumping into another body without acknowledgment, and then floating on, free and alone.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“...she had brought harm to him, in the believe that nothing mattered, that no moment had consequences beyond the moment itself. She had agreed to kill him without realizing that he would die".”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“Then there was survival. There was going on, as she had always gone on, without much joy, against her will, against her instincts, without the stomach for it, but on and on and on, without relief, without release, without a hand to reach out and touch her heart. Without kindness or comfort. But on.
Forced into such poverty, imprisoned in such despair, there was only one thing she was sure she could do. She could survive.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“Nothing says hell has to be fire.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“She was not a woman she was a world.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“Men only give you what they give you...when they know they can't give you what you want.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“She had been adept at the beginning and the end of things, and now she saw that whatever pleasures life had to offer lay in the middle. She could find some peace there.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“Every exchange making him feel like an idiot, making him draw his spine up straight and making him fiddle with his hair, and all he wanted to do was to see her naked on the floor. Not brutal, not unkind, enraptured.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“If you had been there you would not have noticed. You would not have noticed your own stillness in this thin slice of time. But, if you had been there and you had, in some unfathomable way, recorded the stillness, taken a negative of it as the glass plate receives the light, to be developed later, you would have known, when the thought, the recollection was finally developed, that this was the moment it began. The clock ticked. The hour struck. Everything moved again. The train was late.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“...desire had its exaggerated and dramatic pleasures, but he was bored by the endless scenes and recantations. Love was simply the same steady heartbeat hour after hour. It bored him with its lack of event.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“He wanted to slice her open and lie inside the warm blood of her body.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“Learning became her. She loved the smell of the books, the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book. She learned the card catalog. She never learned more than she needed to know. She read romantic novels and she imagined that the men and women at the reading tables around her were the subject of the books. Happy passionate lives, so simple it seemed for others. She read Jane Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, stories in which the lives of the tattered poor turned out to be blissful in the end. She read about the capitals of the world, the cathedrals and minarets, the broad avenues, and the volatile and ever-expanding world of science.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“She had agreed to marry him without realizing that marriage brought a kind a simple pleasure, a pleasure in the continued company of another human being, the act of caring, of carrying with you the thought of someone else. She would, she supposed, never see him age beyond the present day, and found that the thought made her immeasurably sad. Somewhere,”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“You can live with hopelessness for only so long before you are, in fact, hopeless.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“But there was no use. There was no point. It was just a story. It was just a story of people, of Ralph and Emilia and Antonio and Catherine and the mothers and the fathers who had died, too soon or late, of people who had hurt one another as much as people can do, who had been selfish and not wise, and had become trapped inside the bitter walls of memories they wished they had never had. It”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“The company increased as light was let into the house. But”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“She had no one in the world. Her whole world, what was left of it, was here, and there was no way to get back to where she had been before. The”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“Every day there was some new tragedy, some new and inexplicable failure of the ordinary.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“Hell could be like this. ...It could be cold enough to sear the skin from your bones.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“She was just a simple, honest woman standing in the ruin of a late winter garden, waiting for the spring. “Catherine.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“She thought of her life, her patchwork quilt of a life, pieced together from castoff scraps of this and that; experience, knowledge, clairvoyance. None of it made any sense to her.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

“Be not dishearten’d—Affection shall solve the problems of Freedom yet; Those who love each other shall become invincible. —WALT WHITMAN, “Over the Carnage Rose a Prophetic Voice”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife

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