The Greater Picture Quotes

“There is a whole generation of young people just like us wandering around Europe and the rest of the world, trying to find some meaning for why they are alive and what they should choose to do with their time. When Martha leaves and we sit in front of the fire in the living room, I look to Lily until she turns to me and I can see the grief that hides just under the surface of her expression. We are, or at least were, two of those lost souls: wanderers, backpackers, season workers, Wwoofers, Workawayers, travellers: searching the world for something or someplace to hold on to. And we have come home not because we have retired from trying to find answers and are ready to settle into adulthood, but because my death has come upon us fast and unexpected. I am not the first person of this generation of travellers- or any person who lives in this godless, superficial society- to die. But I think that it feels to Lily and to me, my mother too perhaps, that I may very well be.”
― Annie Fisher, The Greater Picture

“I do not know what inspires the image of a fish but it comes to me, wide eyed, open mouthed and gaping, glimmering, swimming towards me as though a creature of the darkness come to claim me. I imagine it in a twinkling blue pool. It swims through the dark currents of the sea, gliding above sea weed, beneath sunlight, augmenting and shying away from the surface. It belongs to this element between land and sky, sifts through it, a creature of the deep. My mind drifts, fades, but then comes back to the fish: its glimmering scales, its strange beady eyes. Its body is contained within the water. It opens its mouth, moving it open and closed as though it’s trying to speak a language I never learned. I think about the fish’s lungs, full of water. Is not the sea contained within the fish, too?”
― Annie Fisher, The Greater Picture

“I would say she’s in the place where the river of time runs into, where the holograms go when they disappear into the air, she is neither completely dreaming, nor fully awake,”
― Annie Fisher, The Greater Picture

“A fearful sob suddenly rises in my throat as I think of what it will be like without her, to not have her warm chest to lie against, to not have her kind face to look into, lost in a darkness without a mother to turn to and her here, daughterless.”
― Annie Fisher, The Greater Picture

“I told her that the pills will let her slip off and that when a person dies there comes a long clean sleep.”
“That’s all,” Alexandria whispers, echoing after her, “a long clean sleep.”
― Annie Fisher, The Greater Picture

“Why must we be so restricted by language, these ruined tongues! These twenty-six letters- how can that explain this agony? How could we ever endeavor to prove what we are here for- through such combinations? Death is just a word someone invented for what happens at the end of a person’s life. It’s only a word: if there was no word for it we wouldn’t be so worried!”
― Annie Fisher, The Greater Picture

“I became part of his ocean, an ocean of poetry that swayed and moved anybody near, that plunged up against every chair and table and tugged and tried our souls. His poem left me dry-mouthed and hungry, diminished only slightly from the bitterness of the beer I continually forgot was in my hand.”
― Annie Fisher, The Greater Picture

“I will never stop loving you, I know it’s a cliché but it’s damn true.”
― Annie Fisher, The Greater Picture

“It's you,” David says, “our queen with your crown, going into some body of water where we cannot follow you.”
― Annie Fisher, The Greater Picture

“We are like prison soldiers committed to an idea. The hills slant upwards tall and unmoving, like giant watchful things if we were not rushing and moving so intently it would be nice to stop and appreciate their own silent ancient beauty.”
― Annie Fisher, The Greater Picture

“A weight lands on me, and a strong doubt that I will not be able to fully commit to the ideas of this strange religion out here in the cold north. I look at the girl’s pale skin flushed slightly across her high cheekbones and wonder if she, perhaps, is Katherine Redford and the article we read was wrong. Maybe her ruse is an old woman but she is, in fact, a young girl. There is something more comforting in that idea, to be healed by a child uninterested in fame or money. A girl as young as her would not seek to inveigle or exploit hopeless people such as us, but an adult might.”
― Annie Fisher, The Greater Picture

“With his mad eyes that cannot seem to look at everything they want to all at once, with the dagger poised in his palm- like sharp teeth or black eyes, he is transforming into something both terrifying and exciting, mysterious and sexy. I reach forward on the sand towards them as though to touch him, my magical boy.”
― Annie Fisher, The Greater Picture