Marianne Wiggins

“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.”

“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.”

“It's not how long it glows. It's not how long the light lasts. It's what it says while it's still visible.”

“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.”

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

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

“I know that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up together. I know that pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without distrubing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame.I know that all life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it, neither has any other human brain. But I do know that in back of it is a power that made it, that power alone can tell, and if there is no power, then it is an infinite chance which man cannot solve.”

“...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.”

“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 will never turn to God.”

“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.”

“The future is the one thing you can count on not abandoning you, kid, he’d said. The future will always finds you. Stand still, and it will find you. The way the land just has run to sea.”