Robin Black > Quotes

“It's unexpectedly painful to have become a pronoun.”
― Robin Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

“Leaning in, he kisses her on the cheek. Like an old acquaintance, she thinks. As though there had never been any passion, nor love, nor rage, nor anything much, just some traces of innocuous familiarity between them. Live long enough, it seems, and every fire can burn itself out.”
― Robin Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

“I don’t think about Terry every day, anymore. And sometimes I’m stunned by that fact. It isn’t only the discomfort of disloyalty I feel, it’s the fact of utter disappearance after death. The idea that as loved as we may be, we may also be forgotten. If only for a day here and there.”
― Robin Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

“There are often two conversations going on in a marriage. The one that you’re having and the one you’re not.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“By forty, is there anyone who hasn’t had to recognize that happiness, as understood by youth, is illusory? That the best one can hope for is an absence of too many tragedies and that the road through the inevitable grief be, if not smooth, then steady?”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“How funny it was. The very thing that had broken her heart, now no longer wanted. A trick of time.”
― Robin Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

“Life. It begins and begins and begins. An infinite number of times. It is all beginnings until the end comes. Sometimes we know it and sometimes we do not, but, at every moment, life begins again.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“I spent so much time thinking about regret. Regret and its accompanying conviction that there is a perfect, placid life, one's own alternate existence, pristine and simple, existing in a neighboring reality in which certain turns in the road were never set upon. And it isn't true. Any of it. I knew that. I had learned it. But it is an irresistible fantasy, if only because it implies we have some control over our fates.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“What part of life isn't peculiar? Seriously? At what point, really, do you stop and say, well, THIS is really strange? THIS part. Not THAT part. But THIS part.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“It was 911 calling me. If you can believe it. Them calling me.”
― Robin Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

“This is where they failed, all those years back, he believes. In taking care of one another when tragedy struck. It broke them, broke them all.”
― Robin Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

“... all of it conspiring to carry them through those first few minutes and through the front door of the house with a lightness that doesn't allow for anything as potentially heavy as an acknowledged fresh start.”
― Robin Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

“I had confessed fully-with all the misguided passion of one who believes that she is cleansing herself and forgets that she may be staining the listener.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“The notion of a country cottage settled in her thoughts as a watercolor, red bricks, climbing roses, the house the most intelligent of the three little pigs built, but with some age on it now; and the place they found in western Massachusetts wasn’t far off, solid enough to withstand huffs and puffs, small enough to feel manageable, large enough to hold visiting grandchildren, old enough to inspire optimism about what might, improbably, endure.”
― Robin Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

“Sometimes life demands things of you, that just the fact of being alive means for allowing for possibilities that may be far from what you'd planned or even hoped.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“My mother's death...seemed so much the focal point of all personal history in our lives, it was as though time began for us when it stopped for her. Maybe this is what happens to everyone - not necessarily sudden deaths , but certain events that create distinct before and after lines, walls really, requiring a great effort to climb, discouraging doing so.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Make your skin as thick as you are able to, for your career. Keep it as thin as you can tolerate, for your art.”
― Robin Black

“It is autumn, mid-October, and the greens of our first encounter with this land have dressed up in fancy costume, orange, scarlet, yellow, to welcome us. It is almost too much to take in, all the beauty.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Jean Kurek looked a bit like a field mouse herself, with her close-cut gray hair, in her shapeless gray dress—no zippers, no buttons. Stroke clothes. Her appearance was no more or less distinguished than it had been all her sixty-eight years, the most likely description of her a string of negatives. Not really tall or short, you wouldn’t say she’s heavy but she isn’t particularly thin, not ugly, not at all, but not pretty either, her hair is that color that isn’t blond or brown. Arguably, her most striking feature was the absence of any striking feature—though her hair had finally claimed a color, gray. She’d certainly never been considered beautiful, not by anyone other than Cliff, who had been adamant on the point for over forty years; but if she’d ever yearned for greater consensus, that yearning had been tempered by her knowledge of how she would loathe the attention it would bring. Jean had spent a lifetime trying to be inconspicuous, appreciating that nature had given her a head start.”
― Robin Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

“There are moments in a creative life when you understand why you do it. Those moments might last a few seconds or maybe, for some people, years. But whatever the actual time that passes, they still feel like a single moment. Fragile in the way a moment is, liable to be shattered by a breath, set apart from all the other passing time, distinct.
But then it changes. And what seemed unimaginably exhilarating gets bogged down, even when a project is going well. It is a gradual, inevitable sobering during which your right to be passive diminishes. What the ether has given you, now in fact belongs to you. And then it is work. Then it is hard.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“thought: maybe this is what a mother feels like at times. When she can’t help one of her children. When she has to just stand by and watch her daughter strike out on the softball field, watch her son fail at math despite whatever effort he may put in. This ache. This defining double bind of roaring, passionate protectiveness and its equal, weighty, leaden uselessness. And even the impatience with it all; and then the guilt about feeling impatient, about finding it a bit oppressive despite the immeasurable love. Maybe this is what mothering sometimes feels like, I thought.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Rejection is part of the game. Or rather, rejection is part of the profession. A profession which at times can feel like a game.”
― Robin Black

“....now and then the universe just insists on changing your life in ways that you didn't ask it to.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“La vita. Comincia e ricomincia, un'infinità di volte. Un inizio dopo l'altro, finchè non arriva la fine. A volte lo sappiamo, a volte no, ma la vita ricomicia in ogni istante”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. —VICTOR HUGO”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Immagino che fosse uno scenario splendido, ma immaginare e ricordare non sono la stessa cosa”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Una pittrice osserva. È questo che fa.
Tuttavia non sempre guarda nella direzione giusta”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“La vita sembrava una cosa grande e preziosa in quelle soffici giornate di neve. C'era abbastanza spazio perchè le cose trascurabili apparissero come tali”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Mentre mi abbandonavo al sonno, la mia mente si riempì di frasi simili, di sciocchezze, arrendendosi alla natura insensata della vita”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Faccio sembrare viva qualunque cosa, non qualunque persona”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing