Home > Work > The Great Offshore Grounds
1 " Have you ever noticed that girls take psych and boys take philosophy? You see it everywhere you look, this idea that women should be so interested in what someone else thinks. I'm not. And that, it turns out, is a problem for people. "
― Vanessa Veselka , The Great Offshore Grounds
2 " Maybe the hardest thing to see straight is love. It’s not the view through the window but the frame around it, and the glass is gone. "
3 " I’m going to say something else and you can save it for after all this. I’ve seen a lot of death. That’s not where people struggle. They struggle with how fast life comes back. Even when you don’t want it to. Life doesn’t have the decency to quit. "
4 " everything is reparable if you change your definition of fixed. "
5 " The simple desire to be comforted, to be assured of what no one can be assured of, that it will all turn out all right. That the things which come to pass, like ghost stories, like demon lovers, will all cut a path toward home. It reminded her of other things too, things she couldn't put into words but which still hurt. "
6 " Fifteen miles south of Seattle and halfway across Puget Sound to the west is Maury Island. Shaped like an arrowhead aimed at the mainland, green as the inner fold of a grass blade, it can be seen from the air cradled in the crook of an elbow of water. Tourists ride over on ferries to watch for whales and UFOs. Jets turn around overhead on their final approach to the airport. Even on days when there is no rain, mist filters through the evergreens until it pulls apart like threadbare cloth and burns off. "
7 " There was a gap between what she saw and what it meant. Then it clicked: tornado. The word changed shape as she watched the cloud, not a box but a cage, not a cage but a net, not a net, something ephemeral and utterly incapable of containing the experience. "
8 " Any preexisting conditions? Oh I don’t know, how about capitalism? "