Deb Olin Unferth

“His rage was a saw, going back and forth, cutting through arteries, hers.”

“You know how it is to want something. Desire builds like a little house in your head and it sits there, half-constructed in your mind. Women who want children are this way. Artists are this way about pictures. It doesn't go away. You may forget for a few months but then it's back, the unfinished pieces of what you want.”

“It takes bravery to care for someone — no matter who he is or what made him, whether he is weak or walking or jumping out of windows. The risk involved is enormous.”

“People are fakers--that's all we do. Can you think of anything you do that's not done for the precise reason of pretending to be something you're afraid you're not?”

“If you think about it, everyone is behind someone and in front of someone. The nature of the sphere, right? No one gets left at the end or is forced to take the lead, and in this way you might say the shape of the earth is democratic. There are hesitations, of course. There are lines going in ways that you wouldn’t imagine. People are passed up or passed over. The tempo is irregular and messy. If you thought about the entirety of it, the legs, the back and forth, it’s a fiasco, an anarchy of steps. It’s impossible. And there’s no way to tidy it or make it in any way manageable, not in one’s imagination or anywhere else.”

“Humans, we just hop out of things, off things. We splatter ourselves in inappropriate places. Because we have nothing to live for. Because we want to destroy what we can. Because we want to be something we can’t. Because we don’t really believe we can die.”

“The utterly empty bottle of his soul.”