Carolyn Parkhurst

“Anyway, I thought, it's wishful thinking, all this talk of ghosts. If the dead wandered among us, their spirits still present on…

— Carolyn Parkhurst

“Walking out of the store with my parrot & sushi, I feel hideous, like everything I've done must be written on my…

— Carolyn Parkhurst

“That's the fundamental flaw in the illusion that writers like to maintain, the idea that we can craft anything approaching the truth.…

— Carolyn Parkhurst

How can it be, I wondered, that we can be lying in bed next to a person we love wholly and helplessly,…

— Carolyn Parkhurst

“This is happening; this is not fiction. And the thing about life? It doesn't have texture at all. Go ahead, feel the…

— Carolyn Parkhurst

“I remember my wife in white. I remember her walking toward me on our wedding day, a bouquet of red flowers in…

— Carolyn Parkhurst

The conclusion I have reached is that, above all, dogs are witnesses. They are allowed access to our most private moments. They…

— Carolyn Parkhurst

It's true, isn't it, that each of us has two hearts? The secret heart, curled behind like a fist, living gnarled and…

— Carolyn Parkhurst

“Go on,"Lexy said. "What do you want to be today?”

— Carolyn Parkhurst

The simplest thing that can be said about any person, any relationship, is that it's not simple at all.

— Carolyn Parkhurst

“The unexpected thing, the miraculous thing, is when a car that's been shattered in a crash, that's been left in the rain…

— Carolyn Parkhurst

What's it like, Lexy? You wake up and you feel - what? Heaviness, an ache inside, a weight, yes. A soft crumpling…

— Carolyn Parkhurst

Perhaps she saw before her a lifetime of walking on the ruined earth and chose instead a single moment in the air.

— Carolyn Parkhurst

“And sitting here now, with all of Lexy's dreams in my lap, I realize there are things about her I will never…

— Carolyn Parkhurst

“You are my finest knight”

— Carolyn Parkhurst

“All I wanted for the rest of my life was to keep making her laugh like that.”

— Carolyn Parkhurst

“It is not the content of our dreams that gives our second heart is dark color: it's the thoughts that go through…

— Carolyn Parkhurst

“I have heard that sometimes when a person has an operation to transplant someone else's heart or liver or kidney into his…

— Carolyn Parkhurst

Washing the Dead is an illuminating and intricately layered novel about the complicated legacies that pass from mother to daughter, and about…

— Carolyn Parkhurst

I remember my wife in white.' It just made people weep to hear it...Everybody just thought it was the saddest sentence that…

— Carolyn Parkhurst

“It occurs to me for the first time that Lorelei is getting older—she must be eight years old by now—and that I…

— Carolyn Parkhurst

I wake up in that state of grief when you can tell you've been mourning even in your sleep.

— Carolyn Parkhurst

“You may know that a cascade of water can wear away stone, but you can't predict what shape the rock will take…

— Carolyn Parkhurst

The conclusion I have reached is that, above all, dogs are witnesses.

— Carolyn Parkhurst

“But whatever that fatal elixir is, that mixture of circumstance and temperament that leads a person to the edge of death and…

— Carolyn Parkhurst