Pamela Erens QUOTES

1 " Her mother’s quiet disapproval and withdrawal was a death in itself, and Franckline’s despair at it was transmitted, she was sure of it, to the child. She transgressed twice, first by making the child, then by giving it her despair, the despair that left it unable to live. "

― Pamela Erens , Eleven Hours

2 " How naive Lore had been, despite being the daughter of a father no one spoke of, despite the strange, incomplete conversations at her mother’s deathbed; how again and again she was caught up short by the discovery that other people had stories they didn’t tell, or told stories that weren’t entirely true. How mostly you got odd chunks torn from the whole, impossible truly to understand in their damaged form. "

― Pamela Erens , Eleven Hours

3 " Writers know all the good reasons for subjecting their work to a sharp trim. Early drafts are notorious for repetition, indirection and overdevelopment of the trivial. "

― Pamela Erens

4 " In the spring and summer I watched my plants flower, but it was, perhaps, in winter that I loved them best, when their skeletons were exposed. Then I felt they had more to say to me, were not simply dressing themselves for the crowds. Stripped of their leaves, their identities showed forth stark, essential. "

― Pamela Erens , The Understory

5 " Night is the worst time. After the long regimentation of the day, the enforced silences, the men want to talk. At first it doesn’t matter what about: TV, movies, travel, jobs. I lie on my side on my mattress as the words pool around me, reciting to myself the botanical classifications for peach, cherry, apple. Magnoliophyta, Magnoliopsida, Rosales, Rosaceae… I smell the smell of other bodies: stale skin, flatulence, cologne. I long to open the windows and let the fresh air sweep the smells away, sweep the bodies away too. Gradually one man drops out of the conversation, then another. Soon there will be only two men left speaking. And these two—they are not the same two every night—will drop their voices, speak in an intimate murmur. Perhaps they are only gossiping about one of the monks. Perhaps they are complaining about the food. But no, there is a reticence that lets me know that they are trying, clumsily, to reach each other. "

― Pamela Erens , The Understory

6 " In her questioning eyes her story of pain is spilling silently out. But Lore does not want to know that story. There is time, right now, for her pain only. "

― Pamela Erens , Eleven Hours

7 " In my experience, cutting back is the crucial act that allows the vitality, precision and emotional heart of a piece of writing to emerge. "

― Pamela Erens

8 " I like bare as well as lush, probably better. What speaks to me most is close to the ground: the shrubs and vines, rather than the great elms, oaks, and maples. The understory, as botanists call it…It is the shrubs that allow the park to survive. "

― Pamela Erens , The Understory

9 " They grabbed a woman held in Death’s grasp and shook and shook and forced Death to drop her "

― Pamela Erens , Eleven Hours

10 " But the moan this time is not simply a moan of will and pain but a call into the emptiness: Is anyone there? There is a blackness spreading into her vision and she feels herself spinning in an unlit sky. Empty, empty, her moan cries. The moan goes on, spiraling deeper into space, and at the end of it Lore falls directly into sleep, with no sense of transition, into a dream of gray waters, of swimming with weary arms and trying to spy the shore. "

― Pamela Erens , Eleven Hours

11 " But she let him stay that one time. Fatigue from fighting him, maybe. Maybe the sense of loneliness when the man’s body withdrew so quickly, and you felt the cold between your legs and the abrupt sense of separateness again. "

― Pamela Erens , Eleven Hours

12 " The external world disappears; all she hears is her own sound; she is a cave filled with a great echoing voice. When she is done she closes her eyes for a moment, returning to herself. "

― Pamela Erens , Eleven Hours

13 " Children were in fact ferocious little animals, sharp and canny and hurt and eager to inflict hurt themselves, who were trying to get what they needed in life. "

― Pamela Erens , Eleven Hours

14 " Natalie will always love the night now: its inventions, its richness, its sympathy. There are creatures of the day (alert, energetic, strict, practiced in loss) and there are creatures of the night (rebellious, vague, imaginative, greedy), and Natalie moves to join the night creatures, receives their hot, loyal embrace. "

― Pamela Erens , Eleven Hours

15 " What speaks to me most is close to the ground: the shrubs and vines, rather than the great elms, oaks, and maples. The understory, as botanists call it. In the decades after the war, when the city turned its back on the park—firing the groundskeepers, ceding greater and greater swaths of land to the muggers and drug dealers—it was not the big trees that began to disappear; it was the shrubs: the witch hazel and jetbead, black haw and sweet pepperbush. The park became like the city: skyscrapers, no texture. And that meant it was dying. The things that live at ground level are what hold the earth fast. . . . It is the shrubs that allow the park to survive. "

― Pamela Erens , The Understory

16 " A breeze of expectation lifts up the crowd--the thick red nourishment will work its magic. But Lore’s blood pressure still drops, and drops again. Franckline looks up and sees, like a shadow drawing away from a window, the soul retreat from Lore’s face "

― Pamela Erens , Eleven Hours