Marianne Wiggins Quotes

What thrills me about trains is not their size or their equipment but the fact that they are moving, that they embody a connection between unseen places.

I was a very, very old child. Sometimes you meet a child who seems more like an adult. I think I was that type of child because I had a nearly fatal kidney disease when I was 9 years old.

Maybe there are moments between any two adults in love when the age of one of them dissolves before the other's eyes, when the first refuge of the soul at its creation is laid bare and skinless as a sunbeam through a window. Innocence and vulnerability, two unmeasurable quantities...Perhaps that is the essence of the protection's intimacy, that it dwells in camouflage and justifies itself in stillness.

You think you know someone by looking at his face but what can one face say about the thousand thoughts behind those eyes.

I don't remember being a child, and that's why I think I'm so child-like now in my unending curiosity and approach to life.

I think what you can’t see is always what you should be frightened of.

I write on a visual canvas, 'seeing' a scene in my thoughts before translating it into language, so I'm a visual junkie.

Asking anyone what she or he is reading is a necessary part of conversation, exchanging news. So I take recommendations from friends - and I always pass along a book I've loved.

Because music is a language unto itself, when I'm writing, I need silence. I need to hear the music and the rhythms of the words inside my thoughts.

I'm fascinated by the narrative of geology, and I'm a veritable pack rat of a collector on the road. I keep a rock hammer in my car.

You speak your mind, don't you...? A rare find in a woman.

...to make art is to realize another's sadness within, realize the hidden sadness in other people's lives, to feel sad with and for a stranger.

I take the world very personally. I take history personally; I want to place myself in the larger context.

I will never turn to God.

Wherever love comes from, whatever is its genesis, it isn’t like a quantity of gold or diamonds, even water in the earth-a fixed quantity, Fos thought. You can’t use up love, deplete it at its source. Love exists beyond fixed limits. Beyond what you can see or count.

There is only ever one answer to the question what did you do with your life, and it's the same--fleeting and unknowable--for every one of us. I lived.