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Sloane Crosley

Sloane Crosley Books

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“Human beings are the only animals that experience denial. All creatures will try to survive under attack, will burrow when under siege or limp through the forest. But they recognize trouble when it hits. Not one fish, in the history of fish, having gotten its fins chewed off, needs another fish's perspective: I don't know, Tom, that looks pretty bad. Denial is humankind'a specialty, our handy aversion. We are so allergic to our own mortality; we'll do anything to make it not so. Denial is also the weirdest stage of grief because it so closely mimics stupidity. But it can't be helped.”

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Book:Grief Is for People
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“This is all my fault for not moving homes or cities, for not taking certain jobs or marrying certain men, for looking backward all the time when I should be looking forward. I dwell too much. I hold on to things I shouldn't, to people I shouldn't. If you don't change, change will find you in its most unruly form. It will press down on your vulnerabilities until they squish out the edges. Life needs volunteers or else it will start calling on people at random.”

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Book:Grief Is for People
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“On occasion, it occurs to adults that they are allowed to do all the things that being a child prevented them from doing. But those desires change when you're not looking. There was a time when your favorite color transferred from purple to blue to whatever shade it is when you realize having a favorite color is a trite personality crutch, an unstable cultivation of quirk and a possible cry for help. You just don't notice the time of your own metamorphosis. Until you do. Every once in a while time dissolves and you remember what you liked as a kid. You jump on your hotel bed, order dessert first, decide to put every piece of jewelry you own on your body and leave the house. Why? Because you can. Because you're the boss. Because . . . Ooooh. Shiny.”

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Book:How Did You Get This Number: Essays
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“Dying / Is an art, like everything else," wrote Plath, whose lifelong flirtation with death went too far one fateful February morning. And art is nothing if not subjective. In the same vein, when I think of Virginia Woolf, it is not merely as a helpless participant in the morbid fascination that has sprung up around these two writers--but of the windows of time of their deaths. The time it took Woolf to fill her pockets with rocks. The selection of those rocks. When does a suicide begin? When do we start counting? At the riverbank or in the river? In the kitchen the night before or the next morning? Rilke warned the "we must learn to die: That is all of life. To prepare gradually the masterpiece of a proud and supreme death, of a death where chance plays no part, of a well-made, beatific, and enthusiastic death of the kind the saints knew to shape." That's nice. But it's hard to throw something like that together at the last minute. What gruesome work suicide makes of grief! Sometimes I conflate blame and action, sometimes I separate them as if in a moral centrifuge, sometimes I think it doesn't matter either way.”

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Book:Grief Is for People
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“Gradually, I start to understand why they are all so desperate to differentiate themselves and yet can't outright trash one another, why they are all so legibly diplomatic: It's because none of their authors have recovered. They want recovery and they want to be of use but if they have to pick? They'll take the recovery. Or, as a consolation prize, the catharsis. Alas, as the Italian author Natalia Ginzburg wrote, "You cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing. You cannot deceive yourself by hoping for caresses and lullabies from your vocation." What you can do is be careful with other people. Human beings are solid things made out of delicate materials. Perhaps this is why we like jewelry as much as we do, because jewelry is our inverse--delicate things made out of solid materials. And it's not nice to poke too hard at someone else's open would. Having written a book on loss yourself, who would know better than you that the printed word should never be mistaken for the final word? Or that some part of you thinks that if you write the best story you can, he will hear you? Because what is the idea that something exists, even if you can't see it, if not the very definition of faith?”

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Book:Grief Is for People
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“Weddings are friendship deal breakers if the friendship is weak. There are too many favors, too many tasks, too much required devotion and Aqua Net for imposters like me. I tried to make eye contact with Francine, to give her a knowing good-bye smile like a ghost of a loved one in a movie. It was no usue, I decided to cut my final pink wire. There would be no more yearly "happy birthdays" and certainly no more bonding with the girl in the duct tape dress. That ship had sailed.”

BooksBook QuotesSloane CrosleyI Was Told There D Be Cake
Book:I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays
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“It seemed that having girlfriends was a sign of innocence and a boundless capacity to care about other women. The hearts in that photograph and multiple strings attached to multiple other hearts. Everything was less about cliché and more about camaraderie. We weren't out for ourselves, we were out for each other. When had I forgotten that? When had I cut the pink wire?”

BooksBook QuotesSloane CrosleyI Was Told There D Be Cake
Book:I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays
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“The first thing to understand is that being a vegetarian is actually a private matter. I'm still taken aback by the question " then what do you eat?" and am embarrassed as I struggle to produce the weeks food diary. Its not that I'm ashamed of what I eat, but its none of anyone's business. I imagine I would have a similar feeling counting up how many pairs of underwear I went thru in a week. The only reason opening someone's fridge is more socially acceptable than opening someone's medicine cabinet is that people keep beer in their fridge.”

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Book:I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays
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“I was stunned. I pulled the phone away and looked quizzically at the hole-punched speaker. Aside from the blood obligation to be my sister's maid of honor, it had never occured to me that I would get asked to be in anyone's wedding. I thought we had reached an understanding, the institution of marriage and I. Weddings are the like the triathlon of female friendship: the Shower, the Bachelorette Party, and the Main Event. It's the Iron Woman and most people never make it through. They fall off their bikes or choke on ocean water. I figured if I valued my life, I'd stay away from weddings and they'd stay away from me.”

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Book:I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays
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“Okay, this is Fran Lebowitz. She gave an interview once for the Paris Review about trying to write fiction and saying that fiction writers start talking about how characters are talking to them, and it's crazy, she's never had that. And I also thought, I'm never gonna be able to do this, because I didn't feel that for a really long time.”

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Author:Sloane Crosley
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