Brian

“The world just goes along. Nothing much matters, you know? I mean really matters. but then sometimes, just for a second, you get this grace, this belief that it does matter, a whole lot.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“Everything good or bad that has occurred in my life has been predictable and inevitable, especially the choices and actions that have made sure I am now utterly alone.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“I don't think I ever really liked the world until I met him.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“Time stops when someone dies. Of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. Death comes too soon. It forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. It rips up the calendar. You aren't at your desk or on the subway or fixing dinner for the children. You're reading People in a surgery waiting room, or shivering outside on a balcony smoking all night long. you stare into space, sitting in your childhood bedroom with the lobe on the desk... The bad part is that when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. all is suspect, a trick to lull us, rock us back into the placid relentlessness of time.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories