"Fear makes liars of us all."
"Is that the way of all love? That it should carry the risk of death?"
"Is that the way of all love? That it should carry the risk of death?"
"No matter where you go, there are cracks in the plaster, nails coming loose, you just have to decide where you want to piece yourself back together. Where the ground feels sturdiest beneath your feet."
"...I wonder if we will tear each other apart someday. If love like this -- deep and painful and reckless-- can last."
"So I look away and try to rid them from my mind. But that only makes it hard to tell if I've escaped my demons or invited them to stay."
"I could kill them all a thousand times and it wouldn't even come close to being enough. But it would always be worth it,"
"Folks like to talk about revenge like it's a righteous thing but it's just hate in a nicer suit."
pickI wasn't expecting to enjoy this book quite as much as I did. Finished in a day. Definite pick. 🙂
"I shut my eyes to lay hands on the fresh earth covering you, Mamá, and night falls. I make fists, scoop, bring it to my mouth. The earth devouring you is dark and tastes like tree bark. It pleases me and reveals things and makes me see."
"and while the rooms were invariably dark, I began to sense a gleam in their darkness like that of an animal's eyes. There was something there glaring back at me. Although it scared me, I wanted to approach it."
"Because I kept fucking up, because it seemed so hard not to fuck up, I lived a life where I had less than what I desired. So instead of wanting more, sometimes I just made myself want even less. Sometimes I made myself believe that I wanted nothing, not even food or air. And if I wanted nothing, I'd just turn into a ghost. And that would be the end of it."
"Men and women going around for months having trouble breathing and seeing doctor after doctor because they think there's something wrong with their lungs. All because it's so damn difficult to admit that something else is...broken. That it's an ache in our soul, Invisible lead weights in our blood, an indescribable pressure in our chest. Our brains are lying to us telling us we're going to die....We're not going to die, you and I"
"Drugs are a sort of dusk that grant us the illusion that we're the ones who decide when the light goes out, but that power never belongs to us. The darkness takes us whenever it likes."
"There are no lines. For everything is a circle, turning back on itself endlessly. This is not to make you dizzy, but to give you the chance to get it right the next time."
"Sven had displayed her on her own pedestal; he'd separated all of her parts so very delicately that now she didn't even know how to move. A tingling prickled over her whole body, even inside, in her chest, and she wondered if she wasn't having an attack: Of nerves, of panic, of rage. Of inertia.... She could only move inside herself, like a woodworm crawling through its own tunnels, digging into an absolutely rigid body."
"Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything."
"Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don't mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End."
"So I wonder what it is this need to tell.
To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling."
"Trauma is a toxin that hooks into our hair and organs and blood and becomes part of us, the way heavy metals do, our bodies nothing more than a layering of flesh around everything ingested and experienced."
"I grew up being taught that God gave us dominion over the animals, without ever being taught that I myself was an animal."
"humans are reckless with our bodies, reckless with our lives, for no other reason than that we want to know what would happen, what it might feel like to brush up against death, to run right up to the edge of our lives, which is, in some ways, to live fully."
"But my mother, in her bed, infinitely still, was wild inside."
"She felt as if her entire life had been denoted with an asterisk, the instructions simple enough until you scanned down to the bottom of the page and found the long list of exceptions and addendums."
"The hand that had written the story, my eyes overflowing with tears, the cheeks that had received them -- they all disappeared in their turn, and in the end all that was left was a voice."
