Rebecca Chambers Quotes

Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs, though others are more like chambered nautiluses, whose architecture grows with the inhabitant and whose abandoned smaller chambers are lighter than water and let them float in the sea.

By the time I walked down the aisle—or rather, into a judge’s chambers—I had lived fourteen independent years, early adult years that my mother had spent married. I had made friends and fallen out with friends, had moved in and out of apartments, had been hired, fired, promoted, and quit. I had had roommates I liked and roommates I didn’t like and I had lived on my own; I’d been on several forms of birth control and navigated a few serious medical questions; I’d paid my own bills and failed to pay my own bills; I’d fallen in love and fallen out of love and spent five consecutive years with nary a fling. I’d learned my way around new neighborhoods, felt scared and felt completely at home; I’d been heartbroken, afraid, jubilant, and bored. I was a grown-up: a reasonably complicated person. I’d become that person not in the company of any one man, but alongside my friends, my family, my city, my work, and, simply, by myself. I was not alone.

...her father finds being called a Holocaust surviver demeaning. 'When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about gas chambers, Auschwitz -- the Holocaust is not just about that,' she said. 'It's about the little humiliations, the loss of dignity.' Her father made much the same point in the film. 'People talk about Sophie's Choice as if it was a rare event,' he said. 'It wasn't. Everybody had to make Sophie's Choice -- all of us. My mother left behind a four-year-old with the maid. You don't think I was beaten and shot at? There are no violins in my story. It is the most common thing that happened.

The Germans are about to reach Stalingrad, and the gas chambers are heating up, but the Ya-Yas are still in high school, and the life of the porch still surrounds them. They are lazy together. This is comfort. This is joy. Just look at these four. Not one wears a watch. This porch time is not planned. Not penciled into a DayRunner . . .I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.

In his 1873 Sex in Education; or A Fair Chance for the Girls, Harvard professor Edward Clarke argued that the female brain, if engaged in the same course of study as the male, would become overburdened and that wombs and ovaries would atrophy.43 Chambers-Schiller reports that in the medical establishment, “a painful menopause was the presumed consequence of reproductive organs that were not regularly bathed in male semen.” Yet

Rebecca approached the causality violation chamber (too grand a name for such a faulty thing), placed her hand against its door, and closed her eyes, much as Philip had during its christening years ago. There was no response from the machine; no prophecy; no apology; no advice. It did not relay the news from other, brighter timelines. It did not tell her what would have transpired had she returned from yesterday's shopping trip a few hours later, or had she turned the steering wheel left instead of right two years ago, or had she not taken that first drink, or had she turned down any one of the thousands of drinks that had followed, or had she chosen not to respond to Philip's insistent and perhaps deliberately oblivious messages during the early days of their online courtship, or had her parents or her grandparents, or her great-grandparents never met. The machine's obstinate silence was all it had to offer; the message of that silence was that she had made her choices in life, and her choices had made her in return.

Some women went west themselves. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller reports that prior to 1900, around 10 percent of land claims in two Colorado counties were filed by unmarried women, some of whom—like South Dakota homesteader “Bachelor Bess” Corey—were more interested in the land-grab than the man-grab. When Oklahoma’s Cherokee Strip was opened to homesteaders in 1893, Laura Crews raced her horse seventeen miles in under an hour to claim the piece of land that she would tend herself for years before oil was discovered on the property.33 Crews would be the last participant of the Cherokee land run to die, in 1976, at age 105, unmarried.34

Chambers-Schiller reports that in the medical establishment, “a painful menopause was the presumed consequence of reproductive organs that were not regularly bathed in male semen.” Yet for all of this, women kept on not marrying and they kept on bucking for change. The

Having been liberated from manual labour and located in the sensory deprivation chambers of apartments and offices, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied.

White of snow or white of page is not" the white of your skin, for skin, except when truly albino, always has some other color sleeping within it—a hint of red maple leaf, a touch of the blue ice at the edge of a melting stream, a richness implied of its many layers, the deltas of cells and blood, that deep fecundity that lies within and makes the skin shed, not like a snake, but as a tree (one of those golden cottonwoods flaring just now at the edge of the river) that sheds its leaves each moment while an eternity of leaf remains. Oh, nothing seems to me as white as your skin, all your languid ease of being—one resting upon the other, the sliver of your shoulder against the black fabric—reminds me so of the lost realm of beauty that I am afraid of nothing, and only dazed (as I was that day at the aquarium when the beluga whales came swimming toward me—how white they were, slipping out of the darkness, radiant and buoyant as silence and snow, incandescent as white fire, gliding through the weight of water, and when they sang in that chamber as small as the chambers of the human heart, murky with exhaustion and captivity and the fragments of what they had consumed, I was almost in love with them; they seemed the lost children of the moon, carrying in their milky mammalian skins a hint of glacial ice and singing to each other of all the existences they had left behind, their fins like the wings of birds or angels, clicking and whistling like canaries of the sea: there was no darkness in their bodies, like clouds drifting through unkempt skies, they illuminated the room). So I did not think of you so much as I felt you drifting through my being, in some gesture that held me poised like a hummingbird above the scarlet blossoms of the trumpet vine, I kissed you above the heart, and by above I mean there, not that geometric center, the breastbone that so many use to divide the body in half and so mistake for the place where the heart lies, but the exact location, a little to the left, just on the crescent where the breast begins to rise; oh, I know all that drift of white implies, the vanished clothing, the disappearing room, that landscape of the skin and night that opens in imagination and in feeling upon a sea of snow, so that just one kiss above the heart is a kiss upon the heart, as if one could kiss the very pulse of being, light upon the head of that pin that pins us here, that tiny disk where angels were once believed to dance, and all that nakedness without could not have been except for all that burning deep within

My life was a shadowed chamber, and when Averil came she swept back the curtains. My existence was murky, poisoned water, and her presence cleared away the filth until the waves sparkled clear again.

To everything we've become because of everything we've lost." Kate Chambers, amateur sleuth in "Ground Truth and Broken Glass," always offers this toast.

Kate Chambers, amateur sleuth in "Ground Truth: A Pittsburgh Murder Mystery," believes that "One drink sharpens your wit, two drinks makes you a philosopher, three or more drinks just makes you stupid.

Are you in love with him? Because Garrick and I heard the end of what he said in the interrogation chamber, and trust me, I might be in love with him after that declaration...

Because Garrick and I heard the end of what he said in the interrogation chamber, and trust me, I might be in love with him after that declaration, but are you? Really and truly?” “Yes.” I hold his stare long enough that he knows I mean what I say. “And that’s never going to change.” Dain’s jaw flexes and he nods once. “Then I’ll trust him as much as you do.” I nod back slowly. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” “Tomorrow,” he agrees.