quotes by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

""If you wanted to kidnap someone, what would you use?" she asked Amit. They were lying in bed, with the lights off. To knock them unconscious. So that you could drag them into the back of your van."
"Chloroform, I guess."
"Really?" She brightened. It made her happy that the person she was marrying would commit crimes in the same way as she would."
— Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (Ms. Hempel Chronicles)

"But that's what I mean: you're Ms. Hempel forever. At least to us."
— Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (Ms. Hempel Chronicles)

"If you were M. Pujol, Madeleine says, I would reach out my hand to you. Like this.

If you were M. Pujol, Adrien says, I would press my mouth against your pulse. Like this.

If you were he, she says, I would cup your chin in my fingers.


If you were he, he says, I would take those fingers into my mouth.

Then my mouth would envy my fingers, she says.

Then your mouth must usurp your fingers, he says.

And then, she says, I would do this.
"
— Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

"This was the feeling that Ms. Hempel couldn't shake: a conviction that she spent her days among people at the age when they are most purely themselves. How could she not be depleted when she came home, having been exposed for hours, without protection, to all those thrumming radiant selves? Here they were, just old enough to have discovered their souls, but not yet dulled by the ordinary act of survival, not yet practiced in dissembling."
— Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (Ms. Hempel Chronicles)