Cathleen Schine Quotes

• “Dear Goat,
  
  How does one fall in love? Do you trip? Do you stumble, lose your balance and drop to the sidewalk, graze your knee, graze your heart? Do you crash to the stony ground? Is there a precipice, from which you float, over the edge, forever?
  
  I know I'm in love when I see you, I know when I long to see you. Not a muscle has moved. Leaves hang unruffled by any breeze. The air is still. I have fallen in love without taking step. When did this happen? I haven't even blinked.
  
  I'm on fire. Is that too banal for you? It's not, you know. You'll see. It's what happens. It's what matters. I'm on fire.
  
  I no longer eat, I forget to eat. Food looks silly to me, irrelevant. If I even notice it. But I notice nothing. My thoughts are full and raging, a house full of brothers, related by blood, feuding blood feuds:
  
  "I'm in love."
  "Typically stupid choice."
  "I am, though, I'm racked by love as if love were pain."
  "Go ahead. Fuck up your life. It's all wrong and you know it. Wake up. Face it."
  "There's only one face, it's all I see, awake or asleep."
  
  
  I threw the book out the window last night. I tried to forget. You are all wrong for me, I know it, but I no longer care for my thoughts unless they're thoughts of you. When I'm close to you, in your presence, I feel your hair brush my cheek when it does not. I look away from you, sometimes. Then I look back.
  
  When I tie my shoes, when I peel an orange, when I drive my car, when I lie down each night without you, I remain,
  
  As ever,
  Ram”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “All these years I've had a story in my mind, the story about us that never really existed. And because of that story, I've kept you framed up on the wall in a little box of nostalgic moonlight.”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “... there had been the two little boys. Now they were gone, too. They loved her and called her and sent her e-mails and would still snuggle up to her to be petted when they were in the mood, but they were men, and though they would always be at the center of her life, she was no longer at the center of theirs.”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “The honeysuckle was everywhere the day the letter arrived, like heat. Wild roses bloomed in hedges of tendrils and perfume. There were fat bees, dirigible bees, plump and miniature. It was a sweet, tangled morning, and the sun rose, leisurely, in a spectacular blush.”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “No, it's like you get an idea in your head ... no, it's more like you get and idea in your heart.”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “Dress you? I'd rather undress you. We don't belong together. But you belong to me. I want you not as you might be. I want you as you are.”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “It was not that the woman boasted. Quite the opposite. She was modest to a fault, the fault being she insinuated her modesty, deftly, into almost any conversation, proclaiming her insignificance and ignorance, thereby assuring a correction.”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “If having an imagination means imagining all the things you don't have - imagining, in fact, the impossibility of your own happiness - is an imagination a good thing?”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “Whatever you do, good or bad, sorry or not, you get punished, darling. Life kicks you in the balls.”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “Biffi said it was more American on an air force base in Crete than it was in Times Square.”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “Betty ran to the door in time to see a handsome young man dashing through the rain toward the house beside her daughter, both of them in pants embroidered with sea creatures - blue whales on his yellow pants, pink lobsters on her ill-fitting brick red pants - and matching pastel green cotton sweaters. When did Miranda buy such odd clothes? She imagined the two of them spotting eachother somewhere, kindred spirits, and starting up a conversation about their shared hobby of Extreme Wasp Attire.”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “What if the blue I see is different than the blue you see?” one of you says in the morning. “The blue is the same, and our eyes are the same. So no way,” says the other of you. Twins in literature are always disguised as each other, or they are sleeping with each other. The banality of “twin sweater sets” cannot make up for Siegmund and Sieglinde. You think that later, of course, much later, when no one wears sweater sets anymore and you have just read a disturbing story by Thomas Mann. “But what if we both call it blue and it’s really a different color but we both have always called it blue so we think we’re seeing the same color but we’re not?” says one of you. “Blue is blue,” the other of you says. “What I see as blue might be what you see as green. We don’t know. You’re not in my eyes. I’m not in your eyes.”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “Life is full of surprises. Why is that always surprising?”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “Most of her feelings she deemed insubstantial and she sent them packing with barely a nod of recognition. But her feelings for her daughter she recognized as inevitable, irresistable, and she reveled in them.”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “As Manhattan came into view, she experienced what she always felt on approaching the city from JFK; a mixture of excitement and calm, a sense of totality; of perfect, living, vibrant, chaotic peace.”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “But Fin would always be a bit of a romantic, at least when it came to books.”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “He flipped through the biggest book imaginable, the dictionary, a book that contained and explained every word in the language, he said. The print was so small it looked like print for a mouse to read.”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “make sure”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “Empiricism and philosophy itself are both sensuous and sensual. The desire to know is desire.”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “The garden stretched out in a soft drift, colors jumbled any way, an unmade bed of red and yellow and pink. Then came the trees. Apple, plum, and the Japanese black pine.”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “The night was mossy and hot...”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “Lines of gulls standing on glassy blue patches of wet sand.”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “They ate and picked sand from their chicken in the pink light.”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “Butterfield Blues Band, Vanilla Fudge...”

  Cathleen Schine

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• “...bottle green Jaguar.”

  Cathleen Schine

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