Poor Deer Quotes

“On this day the girl feels so much love pouring out of her mother that she is certain her mother has the power to save her. Soon she will come to understand she can't be saved.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“Time moves sideways through the most important moments of our lives.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“And I thought: This is love. Oh, I know it wasn't like man-woman love. I know the difference. It wasn't big. It wasn't forced. It had no hurt in it. It was small and gentle and good. It asked nothing. It only gave.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“On this day the girl feels so much love pouring out of her mother that she is certain her mother has the power to save her. Soon she will come to understand she can't be saved.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“She has just learned that some things are forever, and other things are never-again.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“When they started off the day felt so packed with sunshine and promise that Dolly and Margaret felt certain their lives were about to change forever.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“... but they felt closer to each other than before, because they had shared this sweet secret: that a place of watery rainbows lay hidden just beyond the trash and broken things.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“But moments of pure astonishment are a fleeting gift, impossible for humans to hang on to - just like moments of pure grief, or pure rage, or any other kind of pure feeling - all of them dissipate and disappear, as quick as they came...”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“For some reason I have been gifted with another miracle of a day, where I am as happy and astonished with the world as I was on the day of the schoolyard flood.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“Penny's story is more tragic than mine because there is very little goodness or love in it. Even in the most terrible chapters of my life I have always known a certain, savage beauty - in the color of the sky, the sense of birds flying close to my ear, the feel of the soft-loam earth and the joy of running through the untended woods until I become more animal than spirit.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“But there is only so much splendor a person can fathom...”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“When I finally did find a way to untie that impossible knot, then all the most important questions in life would be answered. Why we love. Why we suffer. How we make sense of the happenings in our lives. The stories we tell ourselves to make it through to the next day. Why we press on, even after all hope is lost.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“She worried her sister would die. Or that her sister would linger. None of these outcomes seemed fair to her.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“Each of the machines had its own rhythm, as regular as praying the Rosary, so regular that Margaret even began to imagine the world was a predictable place where good deeds led to good outcomes.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“That's the way it is... You think a thing is impossible, and then you find out any old silly-billy can do it. Even I can do it. Given enough faith you can do the impossible, Margaret Murphy, and don't you forget it...”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“She loves her next-door neighbor, Ruby Bickford, and doesn't know it, because such a love lies just outside the window of Florence's imagination.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“Her sense of the world titled crazily and she felt herself enter into a bizarre new territory where life was nothing more than a jumble of sense impressions and fleeting moments when people grabbed at each other for their sensual pleasure.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“... and I thought about all three of those women at once, and how different they were from one another, and yet, not so different.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“There was a false note in Maarten De Smedt's voice. Margaret heard it. She had just in that instant grown old enough to hear falseness in the voices of adults.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“It had been a long time since she had found herself inside a story as delightful as this one.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“Her change of thinking came about because her teacher had just called her REMARKABLE.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“It seemed to Miss Rudnicki that all the sadness and violence of the world were reflected in that small hand.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“It moved the kindhearted teacher that this dull-eyed girl was working so hard to make something happen on a piece of paper, something that looked like writing, and she remembered why she had become a teacher in the first place. It wasn't just because no one had wanted to marry her. It was also because she had felt a calling. She was remembering the calling now, like a distant dream.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“A new and shifting and heretical thought came to her - that was it MARY, and her boy, who had suffered most. Mary after all, had no special powers. She was an ordinary woman who had been forced by God to give birth, and then forced by God to watch her boy die.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“No one would ever call Agnes beautiful. She is more like an arrow, aimed in a magnificent direction.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer