Elizabeth McCracken
13 quotes
Biography
Elizabeth McCracken is an American author. She is a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, PEN New England Award and the Story Prize.
"Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it."
"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."
"Humor reminds you, when you're flattened by sorrow, that you're still human."
"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.'"
"Books remember all the things you cannot contain."
"The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder."
"Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving."
"Do not trust an architect: he will always try to talk you into an atrium."
"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."
"For about half an hour in mid-1992, I knew as much as any layperson about the pleasures of remote access of other people's computers."
"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."
"There's a good chance that in 40 years, after the floods, people zipping by on scavenged jetpacks with their scavenged baseball caps on backwards, I will be in my rocking chair saying bitterly, 'I remember when 'all right' was two words.'"