White Bird In A Blizzard Quotes

Scratch the surface, and there’s just more surface—chalk dust under your nails, but not much else. What you see, as they say, is what you get.

She knelt at the side of my bed, kissed my cheek, and I woke, rubbed my eyes, looked up at her dreamily. The hall light shone in my eyes. There was a halo in her hair. It must have been that Tupperware bowl on her head.

She was so wicked. Such a classic case of resentment and ambivalence bumping and brushing up against all that maternal instinct. The love and hate in her was as vast as space- all meteors, no atmosphere.

A fairy tale with a twisted ending, one in which the sun sets like napalm on the prince and princess as they walk off, sticky all over with fire.

But the future bores me. I imagine following it like a leaf into traffic. I imagine eating it like a heart made of oatmeal.

The pursuit of exotic beauty in such a life would have been like having a ball of tinfoil in your stomach, all that airy metal filling you up with hunger.

...but I could see how hard it would be for him to imagine the rest of his life, and where it would lead him...It would be like having a job in a fortune cookie factory, standing all day on an assembly line while optimism passed through your hands on flimsy strips of paper-"You will inherit a million dollars," "You will go on an exotic vacation"-but never moving, standing in one place while the damp batter of the fortune cookies slid by, all your possible futures settling into that clamminess as it passed.

Maybe, I think, when you've waited a long time to see something, you need to find your way to it in glimpses.

The gum is so minty in my mouth as I chew it, I can hardly inhale. It's like inhaling the steam off a block of ice, too fresh.

Something wild was going on in that coffin….I was growing shoots and leaves and blossoms. Moss. Bugs. Worms. She leaned over my corpse to kiss my lips, but they were warm instead of cold, and then she realized the dead girl wasn't me at all. Who was that? Who was that dead girl squirming with life? And then she realized- That was her. Our bodies had been switched. Mine for hers.

Maybe he was worried that I would get thinner and thinner, until I became as unfindable as my mother, and I felt a stab of compassion for him, imagining my father alone in this house with the white shadows of his two invisible women.

An early spring started one morning in March with a swarm of sudden, glassy, bird cries, and then the cool jewelry of primrose and violet loosened themselves in the dirt. Then summer burst into the world like a gorgeous car accident- opening eyes all over our bodies in the brilliant light. Fall- the smell of pumpkin guts, sluttish and unsweetened. Until winter fell all over us like pieces of heaven, glazed with oxygen or ether, hitting the grounder in small, cold shards. It was like a year in Eden where no Eve had ever lived.

I began to understand that dancing well had everything to do with believing you could. Like those dreams of flying- dipping gracefully through the air in your weightless body- if in your sleep, you stopped to think about it for more than half a second, you'd crash like a sack of dead ducks onto the roof of a church.

But, perhaps, I should have known then, I should have known that night, standing in the kitchen, that foul meat in the air- looking back on it now, I see that it was the end and the beginning of something more than dinner. More than ruined appetite, a postponed meal, a marriage strained, a freezer unplugged. I could smell the death between them.

A small smudge over there—the bird cruised down to see, hopeful, hungry. But he was disappointed; the smudge did not move. For it was an arm, sticking out of the snow, attached to a body buried beneath. Another odd blot of lifelessness, another, another—the bird took it all in from his aerial vantage point. A yellow hat atop a grey head, eyes frozen shut. A hand, poking out of a drift; a child’s hand, so small, so white, a deathly white, paler than the snow. A wagon wheel, a pale blue dress fluttering out of its spokes, and inside that dress, a lifeless female body. Clothing fluttered, moving, tricking the hawk time and again into thinking it had found its breakfast. Clothing blown off bodies that were now naked to the elements, like the one over there, only a few heartbreaking steps away from a barn. And more small hands, feet, faces upturned, eyes shut tight. That deathly pallor, blue grey against the dazzling white snow. The hawk turned northward, hoping for better hunting grounds. But he was doomed to be disappointed on this cold, sunny morning.

Once, complaining that his mother tried to do things that blind people should not attempt, like lighting candles at Christmas, he said, “My mother wants to have her blindness and eat it, too.” I imagined Phil’s mother spooning blindness into her own open mouth like devil’s food cake. But without texture or weight. Bittersweet and rich. Another time he said, regarding his father’s late support checks, that calling him in Texas wouldn’t help, it would just make the checks even later. “It’s a vicious circus,” Phil said. When I asked if he thought that perhaps writing a letter, explaining their situation—the mortgage payment late again, the electric company calling—might help, he said, “I’m virtuously certain it wouldn’t,” looking martyred and older than his years.

I am sixteen when my mother steps out of her skin one frozen January afternoon- pure self, atoms twinkling like microscopic diamond chips around her, perhaps the chiming of a clock, or a few bright flute notes in the distance- and disappears. No one sees her leave, but she is gone.

I fell in love with the boy next door, and my own flesh became a thing I'd never really worn before. Sometimes, pressing my palms together, I thought I felt a magnetic field between them- something invisible but shaped, like sound, or heat, an egg of light, and it was thought I could hold the life force itself in my hands.

Maybe I stepped into the skin my mother left behind, and became the girl my mother had been, the one she still wanted to be. Maybe I was wearing her youth now like an airy scarf, an accessory, all bright nerves and sticky pearls, and maybe that's why she spent so much time staring at me with that wistful look in her eyes. I was wearing something of hers, something she wanted back. It was written all over her face.

Their marriage, I knew then, as I must have always known- their marriage was like a long drink of water so icy it turns the teeth to diamonds in your mouth. A drink of water from a frozen fountain, twenty years long.

It's impossible to imagine my mother like that. I cannot imagine her softened, thawed, decayed, becoming sweeter as she spoils. I imagine her trapped in a mirror instead. A permanent image of her locked into a rectangle of hard brightness, open-eyed.

Still, for sixteen years I saw the way he passed the butter dish across the dining room table to her, as if he wished it could be more, as if he wished she could life the lid and precious gems would spill over her dinner, as if that might finally make her happy- an inedible, improvident gift, like easy, unexpected laughter.

My mother was always in the center of her own agitation, seeming as though, far away, part of her was being chased along a dirt road by a swarm of bees.

fading and dying. A blue jay stood on its topmost branch, but our movement behind the glass must have disturbed him because he disappeared suddenly with a flash of his blue rounded tail. Yet, in truth, the bird was only a momentary distraction, because it was the walls that drew the eye. I couldn’t tell what color they had been painted because no paint showed through the blizzard of paper that seemed to have adhered to them, as if the room was in a constant state of motion and they had been propelled there and held in place by centrifugal force. The sheets were of varying sizes, some little more than Post-it notes, others

The Arctic is a landscape where migrating birds create blizzards with feathers, where polar bears walk on water, and where white owls circle solitary men, reminding them of their limitations.

Sometimes he'd write my mother's new name under his on a scrap of paper...then, the one that hurt her teeth to see, Mrs. Brock Connors-as if, by marrying, my father would be himself, and also become her.

...but I could see how hard it would be for him to imagine the rest of his life, and where it would lead him...It would be like having a job in a fortune cookie factory, standing all day on an assembly line while optimism passed through your hands on flimsy strips of paper-"You will inherit a million dollars," "You will go on an exotic vacation"-but never moving, standing in one place while the dump batter of the fortune cookies slid by, all your possible futures settling into that clamminess as it passed.