#elizabeth McCracken

[mythoughttherapy]

"Truthfully, this is the fabric of all my fantasies: love shown not by a kiss or a wild look or a careful hand but by a willingness for research. I don't dream of someone who understands me immediately, who seems to have known me my entire life, who says, I know me too. I want someone keen to learn my own strange organization, amazed at what's revealed; someone who asks, and then what, and then what?”

—Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

[becausegoodbye]

"If, despite everything, I began work on a memoir and wrote down everything I remember for sure about my life—all of my life—I might be able to assemble a pamphlet. If I wrote down everything I know about fiction: a second, smaller pamphlet. What I believe: it makes a difference how tall people are, how short, how much they weigh. How they move; how it feels to be them, temperature, hips, itch, swoon. Young writers sometimes catalog every thought and emotion of a character without knowing their weight or their gestures. But if you don't take your characters' bodies into account, your work is in danger of being populated by sentient, anguished helium balloons. I tell my students all the time, Don't forget your characters' physical selves. If your characters feel distant, remember their specific gravity on the earth. If you know what a character is doing with her hands, you might know what she's doing with her head. If you know her feet, you may know her soul."

Elizabeth McCracken, The Hero of This Book

[goodgriefnd]

"Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving." Elizabeth McCracken

I saw this quote today and I cannot find the source beyond the author, does anyone know the book it is from?

It really perfectly captures that isolating feeling in grief, where time seems to stop, where it all seems to still, yet the world, although may briefly acknowledge your loss, seems to just move on, to forget you in your grief.

[meghanmcc]

[bookquotesforthesoul]

I missed my mother. I mean, I kept missing her, but in a theater the missing took on a bodily quality.

Elizabeth McCracken, The Hero of This Book

[anokatony]

'The Hero of this Book' by Elizabeth McCracken – A “Novel” about her Mother

‘The Hero of this Book’ by Elizabeth McCracken – A “Novel” about her Mother

  ‘The Hero of this Book’ by Elizabeth McCracken     (2022) – 177 pages   We could all spend some time thinking about our mothers. Your birth mother, that woman who went through all that trouble to bring you into this world, surely deserves it. We love our mothers, and most of us could write nice things about them. If we couldn’t, it would probably make for a more interesting book. Elizabeth…

[oxymoron0-o]

A dead person is lost property. You know this. Still, you've been searching for what was taken. You know—you've been schooled in this fact—that what you owned will never be returned to you. But you're still owed something. You can't eat lunch with your friend, her fingers marking chess moves across the board. You can't hear those same fingers on a computer keyboard or feel them on your shoulder at a time you need them. People take their hands with them, no matter where they go.

“Juliet” by Elizabeth McCracken

[girlwithlandscape]

“Truthfully, this is the fabric of all my fantasies: love shown not by a kiss or a wild look or a careful hand but by a willingness for research. I don’t dream of someone who understands me immediately, who seems to have known me my entire life, who says, I know me too. I want someone keen to learn my own strange organization, amazed at what’s revealed; someone who asks, and then what, and then what?”

—Elizabeth McCracken, “The Giant’s House”

[positivexcellence]

IN CONVERSATION WITH ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN

[makeyourownmyth]

When I’m swimming I’m swimming. When I’m writing I’m writing. At neither time do I consider the judgment of others, though I am judgmental myself...Other people swim faster than me but we’re all in the same water. It doesn’t matter how expert they are: how they swim has no effect on how I swim...People will tell you that a novelist has to have a love for the human race but if I didn’t hate strangers from time to time I wouldn’t get any work done at all...

https://lithub.com/elizabeth-mccracken-on-savoring-the-mystery-of-writing/

[mythologyofblue]

Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving.

Elizabeth McCracken 

[wellconstructedsentences]

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.

Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken

[universitybookstore]

New from Ecco and the always delightful Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway. (Read the Washington Post review here.)

[bookquotesforthesoul]

I came to understand: Your family is the first novel that you know.

Elizabeth McCracken, The Hero of This Book

[maryannmackey]

Once upon a time, happily ever after, was never seen again. Such things are only true in the storybook world, not ours. Once upon a time there was a little girl - no, there have been millions of little girls, at all times. They lived happily ever after- but after the disaster, your happiness is always shadowed by the closeness of your escape. Never seen again- you can't stop seeing the dead wolf opened like luggage on the bed, his turned-out stomach embossed with the pattern of your grandmother's lace bonnet, his intestines perforated by her kicking heels. The dead are seen over and over, and most of the living. One upon a time there was a girl. Then she was again.

Bowlaway, Elizabeth McCracken

[virginias-daughter]

Grief looks like nothing from from the outside, it looks like surrender, but it 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?

From Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken