Karen Walker Quotes

How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible.

The only thing you have to do in this life is die," said Mrs. Pinsky..."everything else is a choice.

Some say that love is the sweetest feeling, the purest form of joy, but that isn't right. It's not love--it's relief.

Sometimes the saddest stories take the fewest words.

I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.

Who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret?

Doesn't every previous era feel like fiction once it's gone?

Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.

Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy.

We were, on that day, no different from the ancients, terrified of our own big sky.

This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love.

But the past is long, and the future is short.

I should have known by then that it's never the disasters you see coming that finally come to pass; it's the ones you don't expect at all.

The things that could have happened but did not are just as crucial to a life as all the things that do.

I've become a collector of stories about unlikely returns: the sudden reappearance of the long-lost son, the father found, the lovers reunited after forty years. Once in awhile, a letter does fall behind a post office desk and lie there for years before it's finally discovered and delivered to the rightful address. The seemingly brain-dead sometimes wake up and start talking. I'm always on the lookout for proof that what is done can sometimes be undone.

And this one fact seemed to point to other facts and others still: Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end.

Maybe loneliness was imprinted in my genes, lying dormant for years but now coming into full bloom.

Sometimes death is proof of life. Sometimes decay points out a certain verve.

I liked the idea, how the past could be preserved, fossilized, in the stars. I wanted to think that somewhere on the other end of time, a hundred light years from then, someone else, some distant future creature, might be looking back at a preserved image of me and my father at that very moment in my bedroom.

Worry, she often reminds her patients, is a kind of creativity. Fear is an act of the imagination.

But time moves in only one direction. Not everything that breaks can be repaired.

It was a rough crossing, the one from childhood to the next life. And as with any other harsh journey, not everything survived.

But I guess every bygone era takes on a shade of myth.

I had grown into a worrier, a girl on constant guard for catastrophes large and small, for the disappointments I now sensed were hidden all around us right in plain sight.

They died, he wrote, as if overcome by sleep - or, according to a second translation: as if drowned in a dream.

There is a difference between what is not true and what cannot be measured.

...how much quieter that ending would be, a whole world drowned in sleep, than all the other ways we have to fail.

I think we lost something else when we lost that crisp rhythm, some general shared belief that we could count on certain things.

This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected. Blurry vision could be fixed invisibly with the magic of the contact lens. Crooked teeth were pulled straight with braces. Spotty skin could be chemically cleared. Some girls were turning beautiful. A few boys were growing tall.

A man should enjoy things if he can; he should spend his final days in the sun. Mine will be spent by a reading lamp.

My grandfather liked any story in which the unlikely turned out to be true.

When one's life seems broken beyond repair, there remains one last move: a person can at least shut her eyes.

Not everything that happens in a life can be digested. Some events stay forever whole. Some images never leave the mind.

Who are we to say that they are not right now dreaming a better world?

I kept quiet, but the knowledge gathered like a storm. I could see the future: My father wasn't coming back. And this one fact seemed to point to other facts and others still: Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end.

They say that humans can read each other in a hundred subtle ways, that we can detect messages in the subtlest movements of a body, in the briefest expressions of a face, but somehow, on that day, I had communicated with amazing efficiency the exact opposite of what I most wanted in the world.

We were kids, and it was summer. We were trespassing and half in love.

Art thrives in times of uncertainty.

To close one's eyes can be an act of survival.

So much that seems harmless in daylight turns imposing in the dark. What else, you had to wonder, was only a trick of light?

I never knew until then that snow made everything quiet, somehow silencing all the world's noise.

The mother seems relieved to have heard that this affliction might be psychological, as if the failings of the mind are any less destructive than those of the body.

They sleep like children, mouths open, cheeks flushed. Breathing as rhythmic as swells on a sea. No longer allowed in the rooms, their mothers and fathers watch them through double-paned glass. Isolation - that's what the doctors call it: the separation of the sick from the well. But isn't every sleep a kind of isolation? When else are we so alone?

But doesn't every precious era feel like fiction once it's gone? After a while, certain vestigial sayings are all that remain. Decades after the invention of the automobile, for instance, we continue to warn each other not to 'put the cart before the horse'. So, too, we do still have 'day'dreams and 'night'mares, and the early-morning clock hours are still known colloquially (if increasing mysteriously) as 'the crack of dawn'. Similarly, even as they grew apart, my parents never stopped calling each other 'sweetheart'.

His girl will love and be loved. She will suffer, and she will cause suffering. She will be known and unknown. She will be content and discontented. She will sometimes be lonely and sometimes less so. She will dream and be dreamed of. She will grieve and be grieved for. She will struggle and triumph and fail. There will be days of spectacular beauty, sublime and unearned. There will be moments of rapture. She will sometimes feel afraid.

Ours was a sudden bond, the kind possible only for the young or the imperiled.

But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different - unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.

It strikes her again, how many of a child’s fears are just rational responses to the facts of everyday experience.

The unproven, he says, should not be confused with the impossible.

It was that time of life: Talents were rising to the surface, weaknesses were beginning to show through, we were finding out what kinds of people we would be. Some would turn out beautiful, some funny, some shy. Some would be smart, others smarter. THe chubby ones would likely always be chubby. THe beloved, I sensed, would be beloved for life. And I worried that loneliness might work that way, too. Maybe loneliness was imprinted in my genes, lying dormant for years but now coming into full bloom.

Months later, Michaela's mother would spread a star chart before us and explain to me that the slowing had shifted everyone's astrological signs. Fortunes had changed. Personalities had rearranged. The unlucky had turned lucky. The lucky had turned less so. Our fates, so long ago written in the stars, had been rewritten in a day.

Past, present, future - a physicist might say these distinctions are illusions anyway. The human brain is subject to all kinds of misperceptions, and the waking mind not always more attuned to reality than the dreaming one.

What I understood so far about this life was there were the bullies and the bullied, the hunters and the hunted, the strong and the stronger and the weak

Here in the last minutes, the very end of the world, someone's tightening a screw thinner than an eyelash, someone with slim wrists is straightening flowers...

Of all the strange phenomena that befell us that year, maybe nothing surprised me more than the sound of that small question rolling out of Seth Moreno's mouth: "Want to come?

A veces las historias más tristes son las que menos palabras requieren: no volví a saber nada de Seth Moreno.

We were like wanderers in a desert, blessed with a rare downpour, but unable to store the rain.

For days afterward, a series of magical thoughts flew through my mind. For instance, it seemed somehow surprising that the hours continued to pass in spite of what I knew. It was almost shocking that time did not, in fact, stop.

After the slowing, every action required a little more force than it used to. The physics had changed. Take, for example, the slightly increased drag of a hand on a knife or a finger on a trigger. From then on, we all had a little more time to decide what not to do. And who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of a regret? But the new gravity was not enough to overcome the pull of certain other forces, more powerful, less known--no law of physics can account for desire.

I knew everything about the back of that head - the swirl of his hair, the curve of his ear, the straight, sharp line of his jaw. I liked the way he smelled like soap even late in the afternoon.

I like to think about how my parents' lives once shimmered in front of them, half hidden, like buried gold. Back then the future was whatever they imagined-- and they never imagined this. But doesn't every previous era feel like fiction once it's gone?

From then on, we all had a little more time to decide what not to do. And who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret?

A single red bucket dangled from a single spoke like the last fruit of summer, or like autumn's final leaf.

Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end

. . . perhaps the reasons for a man to leave his life were too obvious for him to name.

And so much of this life will remain always beyond her understanding, as obscure as the landscapes of someone else's dream.

How expert we are at looking away from what we would rather not see.

Maybe it had begun to happen before the slowing, but it was only afterward that I realized it: My friendships were disintegrating. Things were coming apart. It was a rough crossing, the one from childhood to the next life. And as with any other harsh journey, not everything survived.

Seth and I used to like to picture how our world would look to visitors someday, maybe a thousand years in the future, after all the humans are gone and all the asphalt has crumbled and peeled away. We wondered what thise visitors would find here. We liked to guess at what would last. Here the indentations suggesting a vast network of roads. Here the deposits of iron where giant steel structures once stood, shoulder to shoulder in rows, a city. Here the remnants of clothing and dishware, here the burial grounds, here the mounds of earth that were once people's homes. But among the artifacts that will never be found - among the objects that will disintegrate long before anyone from elsewhere arrives - is a certain patch of sidewalk on a Californian street where once, on a dark afternoon in summer at the waning end of the year of the slowing, two kids knelt down together on the cold ground. We dipped our fingers in the wet cement, and we wrote the truest, simplest things we knew - our names, the date, and these words: We were here.

With a little persuasion, any familiar thing can turn abnormal in the mind. Here’s a thought experiment. Consider this brutal bit of magic: A human grows a second human in a space inside her belly; she grows a second heart and a second brain, second eyes and second limbs, a complete set of second body parts as if for use as spares, and then, after almost a year, she expels that second screaming being out of her belly and into the world, alive. Bizarre, isn’t it?

Of my grandfather's eighty-six years on the planet, he had lived two of them in Alaska...But those two years had expanded, sponge-like, in his memory, overtaking much of the rest. Whole decades had passed in California without producing a single worthy anecdote

Doesn’t big news always leak before it’s meant to? Aren’t secrets usually spilled?

She left her keys in the teeth of the lock where they would dangle all day.

It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There's a certain boldness to inaction.

This was the first time I noticed it, the inevitable space between father and man.

Every one of her days hums with the possibility that she might be doing it wrong.

He'd grown eager to hand off his things, as if the weight of his possessions kept him tethered to this earth, and by giving them away, he could snip those strings.

This had become a game of ours. We were serious kids made more so by the times.

How quaint the old twenty-four-hour clock began to look to our eyes, how impossibly clean-cut, with its twin sets of twelve, as neat as walnut shells. How had we believed, we wondered, in such simplistic things?

He never talked about his mother--and I had learned never to ask--but I sometimes sensed her absence in his reactions to certain events, as if he knew even then that there existed under everything a universal grief.

The more time that passes, what begins to seem uncanny to Ben is the fact that all the days ahead are such a darkness, that all of us move through our hours as if blindfolded, never knowing what will happen next. How can he send his daughter out into a world like that? But even an infant’s brain can predict the rough path of a falling object in flight. And so, maybe, in a way, Ben can see what’s coming: His girl will love and be loved. She will suffer, and she will cause suffering. She will be known and unknown. She will be content and discontented. She will sometimes be lonely and sometimes less so. She will dream and be dreamed of. She will grieve and be grieved for. She will struggle and triumph and fail. There will be days of spectacular beauty, sublime and unearned. There will be moments of rapture. She will sometimes feel afraid. The sun will warm her face. The earth will ground her body. And her heart—now thrumming strong and steady, against her father’s chest, as he rocks her to sleep on a porch swing one evening in early summer, at the very start of a life—that heart: it will beat, and it will someday cease to beat. And so much of this life will remain always beyond her understanding, as obscure as the landscapes of someone else’s dreams.

how impossibly clean-cut, with its twin sets of twelve, neat as walnut shells.

...but most houses in California were built without roots, leaving us trapped above ground with the light.

El sol había desarrollado una nueva y preocupante habilidad: nos había quemado a través de la ropa.

El amor se deteriora, los humanos fracasan, las eras concluyen.

A finales de noviembre los días llegaron a tener cuarenta horas.

Los días naturales se habían alargado hasta las sesenta horas: casi dos días de oscuridad y luego dos días de luz.

It never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different — unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.

Antidepressants were swimming in the rivers, and our bloodstreams were just as polluted as the waterways.

As strange as the new days seemed to us at first, the old days would come to feel very quickly the stranger.

The biology majors among them would someday come to learn this fact: certain parasites can bend the behavior of their hosts to serve their own purposes. If viruses could do it, here is how it would look: seventeen people crowded into one small room, seventeen pairs of lungs breathing the same air, seventeen mouths drinking from the same two shot glasses, again and again, for hours.

Mais tarde, viria a pensar que esses primeiros dias foram a altura em que aprendemos como espécie que andávamos preocupados com as coisas erradas: o buraco na camada de ozono, o degelo das calotes polares, o vírus do Nilo Ocidental, a Gripe Suína e as abelhas assassinas. As verdadeiras catástrofes eram sempre diferentes - inimagináveis, sem aviso, desconhecidas.

El daño estaba hecho, y habíamos llegado a pensar que estábamos extinguiéndonos. Pero tal vez el disco les informe de que seguimos adelante. Resistimos, incluso a pesar de que la mayoría de los expertos pronosticaron que nos quedaban solo unos cuantos años de vida. Continuamos contando historias y enamorándonos. Peleándonos y perdonando. Siguieron naciendo bebés. Conservamos la esperanza de que el mundo pudiera recuperarse.

Más adelante, pensé en aquellos primeros días como el momento en que aprendimos como especie que nos habíamos preocupado por las cosas equivocadas: el agujero de la capa de ozono, la desaparición de los casquetes polares, la gripe porcina y del Nilo, las abejas asesinas. Aunque supongo que lo que nos preocupa nunca es lo que acaba ocurriendo al final. Las verdaderas catástrofes siempre son diferentes, inimaginables, imprevistas y desconocidas.

Estábamos viviendo bajo una nueva gravedad, tan imperceptible que casi no nos dimos cuenta, aunque nuestro cuerpo estaba sujeto a su dominio. Las semanas siguientes, mientras los días continuaban alargándose, los jugadores de fútbol americano comprobaron que el balón no volaba tan lejos como antes; los bateadores de béisbol resbalaban con más facilidad. Cada vez me costaba más esfuerzo enviar la pelota al otro lado del campo de una patada. Los pilotos acabaron por dejar de volar. Todo caía al suelo más deprisa.

Pero entre los artefactos que probablemente no descubran nunca —entre los objetos que probablemente se desintegren mucho antes de que llegue nadie de ninguna parte— hay cierto fragmento de acera en una calle de California, donde una vez, en una tarde oscura de verano, casi un año después de iniciarse la ralentización, dos niños se arrodillaron sobre el suelo frío. Metimos los dedos en el cemento húmedo y escribimos la más sincera y sencilla de las verdades que conocíamos: nuestros nombres, la fecha y estas palabras: «Estuvimos aquí».

Aquella mañana el ruido de los grillos era ensordecedor, el chirrido de tantos animales nuevos en la oscuridad —se habían multiplicado desde que empezó la ralentización—. Igual que los demás insectos. Ahora que había tan pocos pájaros medraban los organismos más pequeños. Cada vez había más arañas en nuestros techos. En los desagües del baño asomaban escarabajos. Tuvimos que suspender uno de los entrenamientos de fútbol cuando millones de mariquitas se posaron a la vez sobre el campo. Incluso la belleza en abundancia puede ser horripilante.

Todavía me sorprende lo poco que sabíamos en realidad. Teníamos cohetes, satélites y nanotecnología. Teníamos brazos y manos robotizadas, robots para recorrer la superficie de Marte. Nuestros aviones no tripulados, dirigidos por control remoto, podían oír voces a cinco kilómetros de distancia. Podíamos fabricar piel artificial, clonar ovejas. Podíamos hacer que el corazón de un muerto bombeara sangre en el cuerpo de un desconocido. Estábamos dando grandes pasos en el dominio del amor y la tristeza: teníamos medicinas para despertar el deseo y para acallar el dolor. Llevábamos a cabo toda suerte de milagros: podíamos hacer que los ciegos vieran y que los sordos oyesen, y los médicos lograban extraer a diario a bebés del útero de mujeres infértiles. En la época de la ralentización, los investigadores de células madre estaban a punto de curar la parálisis: sin duda los inválidos habrían vuelto a andar. Y sin embargo lo desconocido todavía sobrepasaba a lo conocido. Nunca llegamos a determinar las causas de la ralentización. El motivo de nuestro sufrimiento continuó siendo un misterio.

Hay quien dice que la ralentización nos afectó de mil maneras imperceptibles, desde la esperanza de vida de las bombillas hasta el tiempo que tardaba en fundirse el hielo y en hervir el agua o la tasa en que se multiplican y mueren las células humanas. Unos afirman que nuestro cuerpo envejecía más despacio en los días inmediatamente posteriores al inicio de la ralentización, que los muertos morían de muerte más lenta y que los bebés tardaban más en nacer. Hay algunas pruebas de que los ciclos menstruales se alargaron levemente en esas primeras dos semanas.

By now, certain alternate theories are beginning to circulate online. It's the government, they say. Or it's Big Pharma. Some kind of germ must have gotten loose from a lab at the college. Think about it, they say: Do you really believe that a completely new virus could show up in the most powerful country on earth without scientists knowing exactly what it is? They probably engineered it themselves. They might be spreading this thing on purpose, testing out a biological weapon. They might be withholding the cure. Or maybe there's no sickness at all—that's what some have begun posting online. Isn't Santa Lora the perfect location for a hoax? An isolated town, surrounded by forest, only one road in and one road out. And those people you see on TV? Those could be hired victims. Those could be crisis actors paid to play their parts. And the supposedly sick? Come on, how hard is it to pretend you're asleep? Maybe, a few begin to say, Santa Lora is not even a real town. Has anyone ever heard of this place? And look it up: there's no such saint as Santa Lora. It's made-up. The whole damn place is probably just a set on some back lot in Culver City. Don't those houses look a little too quaint? Don't be naïve, say others—they don't need a set. All that footage is probably just streaming out of some editing room in the valley. If you look closely, you can tell that some of those houses repeat. Now just ask yourself, they say, who stands to benefit from all this. It always comes back to money, right? The medical-industrial complex. And who do you think pays the salaries of these so-called journalists reporting all this fake news? Just watch: in a few months, Big Pharma will be selling the vaccine.