I’m so sorry,” he said, because after Pamela died, he promised himself that if anyone told him the smallest, saddest story, he would answer, I’m so sorry. Meaning, Yes, that happened. You couldn't believe the people who believed that not mentioning sadness was a kind of magic that could stave off the very sadness you didn't mention – as though grief were the opposite of Rumpelstiltskin and materialized only at the sound of its own name.

— Elizabeth McCracken

It's an amazing thing to watch a lizard fold a moth into its mouth, like a sword swallower who specializes in umbrellas.

— Elizabeth McCracken

I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story.

— Elizabeth McCracken

Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie down in the arms of anyone who asked. Not like bookstore books, which married their purchasers, or were brokered for marriages to others.

— Elizabeth McCracken

Like all good mothers, she always knew the worst was going to happen and was disappointed and relieved when it finally did.

— Elizabeth McCracken

My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don't know from one day to the next what's remembered and what's made up. Like when you memorize a poem, and for one small unimportant part you supply your own words. The meaning's the same, the meter's identical. When you read the actual version you can never get it into your head that it's right, and you're wrong.

— Elizabeth McCracken

Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course, you can't out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors the local cuisine. In that different sunlight, it stands out, awkward, yours, honking in the brash vowels of your native tongue in otherwise quiet restaurants. You may even feel proud of its stubbornness as it follows you up the bell towers and monuments, as it pants in your ear while you take in the view. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at home we generally understand each other better.

— Elizabeth McCracken

Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.

— Elizabeth McCracken

The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.

— Elizabeth McCracken

There are two MFA programs here at the University of Texas, and I read on the jury of both of them. And it's amazing to me how many really talented young writers seem to fear humor.

— Elizabeth McCracken