Beth Kephart

“Imagine music gushing down the hollow places in your bones, and making you liquid, and giving you speed. Imagine music turning your body into a song.”

“The night before, I'd gone overboard with my Lila poems, and maybe it's true that I was hoping that in them he'd see the genius of me, the beauty of my words in his hands.”

“You obsess (but of course you obsess) until the joy is gone from that thing you'd loved, until your fury overwhelms your passion, until you no longer know how to sit with your back against a tree and write poetry that no one will ever see.”

“Nature is not the number-one mystery, I’ve learned. It’s the heart that takes top honors.”

“His client needs him, he says. Needs him? But isn’t he needed at home?”

“When I was a boy, that was all I wanted—to grow a pair of wings and get up into the sky. I had a basement full of failed wing projects. Boards and capes and motors, even a pile of found feathers I once tried to glue together with a bottle of Elmer’s; you should have seen your grandmother’s face. But I never got any higher than the backyard fence I’d launch from. I never got inside a cloud. Your raven did.”

“I’d thought he was stars and then I’d thought he was a fox. I had thought I’d been alone, but I hadn’t.”

“How do you know when an apology is true—when it means something, or can change something, or will last outside the moment?”

“I’d have given any- thing to know how Mom and Dad were, but you can’t ask your parents such questions. You have to wait for them to tell you what it is that will happen next...”

“Beauty is the worst kind of lie.”

“Have you ever watched a leaf leave a tree? It falls upward first, and then it drifts toward the ground, just as I find myself drifting towards you.”

“Fox-TrotBy the stream the fox and she-fox stoodNose to nose beneath the starsDancing the music of the woods.The deer rapped a beat with their hooves,The ravens sang from raven heartsAs by the stream the fox and she-fox stood.The great owl called as a great owl would,The squirrels all shimmied in the dark,Dancing the music of the woods.Then from the north a fierce wind blewAnd broke the starry dance apartBy the stream where the fox and she-fox stood.”

“Anna would say that she was a cat like Gemma, with nine lives to spend, all nine precious and delicious.”

“You know how a river goes on and on? That's my love for you.”

“Forgiveness, which is the place that every story turns, the chance we give each other.”

“Here’s another change I’ve noticed: The dark is more than the sun dropping off, more than the moon and the stars. It’s what you can’t see that you hope you will see, what hasn’t been that might be.”

“I hold to fiction as a cure, or partial cure, or cause for hope, or essential distraction from the rain you wake up to, the doubts in your head, the daily desolation that you have not yet said what is most true, you have not yet crafted the story that reveals you. And therefore something waits. Therefore you must wake and you must write and you are not alone.Your fiction is with you.”

“Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.”

“Were there language, I'd be my own lone letter.”