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1 " People here had redwood trees in their backyards. You were never far from the infinite. "
― Amy Stewart , The Last Bookstore in America
2 " The notion that a story should unfold over the course of two or three hundred pages was as antiquated as the idea that a band’s musical output should consist of four or five songs on one side of a piece of vinyl, and then four or five slightly more experimental and intelligent songs on the other side. Albums used to make sense; they used to hang together as a body of work, and this had something to do with the fact that vinyl records could only hold eight or ten songs. Digital music changed all that. A quote-unquote album could now hold two mp3s or two hundred. "
3 " She had forgotten the only trick her mother had taught her about marriage: the more impractical your husband’s ideas are, the more you get behind them. "
4 " The twentieth century contributed skyscrapers and typewriters and automobiles and telephones to the world. Solid, workable objects. Every innovation of the twenty-first century could be erased by a power failure. "
5 " Don’t bother fighting with your husband over something he’s never actually going to do. He’ll give up on his own eventually, and then you don’t have to be the bad guy. "
6 " After Sy died, a friend of Edith’s who was also a widow gave her this advice about getting through the first year: Get up in the morning. Take a shower, get dressed, have something to eat. After that, you can spend the rest of the day in bed if you want to. It was a trick, of course. Once you’d gotten yourself up and pulled yourself together, there wasn’t much point in going back to bed. But that little lie was what sustained her. Eight magical words: You can go back to bed after breakfast. "
7 " I can’t keep doing this,” she said to Sy, “but I can’t do anything else, either. So where does that leave me? "
8 " Everything about a redwood forest was prehistoric: the ancient trees themselves, each growing on the rootstock of some much older specimen, many of them hollowed out by lightning but still rising, stretching hundreds of feet into the sky. Even the ferns were oversized, spanning the width of a small car. You could imagine dinosaurs walking among these trees. They seemed to exist outside of ordinary time, which may explain why all of Humboldt seemed to be one or two steps out of synch with the rest of the world. People here had redwood trees in their backyards. You were never far from the infinite. "
