More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”
That’s the problem. You never know.
I don’t think I believed this even then. I thought he was lying, but I thought it was a pitiful lie.
He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all. I was still breathing.
Nothing is ever certain.
They hunted. So did I.
He knew I was away, but when people left they always came back.
He’d given her a half a heart.
She kissed him; it was glorious. I was almost alive again.
That someone could have the face of one country and the voice of another and then move to a third was too incredible for me to fathom.
They were happy not to have her there: her intelligence made her a problem.
we were born to keep each other company. Odd girls who had found each other in the strangest way—
“A father’s suspicion . . .” she began. “Is as powerful as a mother’s intuition.”
His lovely wife, his lovely girl.
It was not so much, she would write in her journal, that she wanted to have sex with women, but that she wanted to disappear inside of them forever. To hide.
Because it was dark, because Ruth was facing away from her, because Ruth was almost a stranger, Lindsey said what she felt. “More than anyone will ever know.”
Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
He had had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.
Her brain was a storm, her usual insight gone.
What had happened to me could happen to anyone.
But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything.
Being who she was—whoever that was.
“How can I be expected to be trapped for the rest of my life by a man frozen in time?”
His devotion to me had made me know again and again that I had been beloved. In the warm light of my father’s love I had remained Susie Salmon—a girl with my whole life in front of me.
But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say
And her question rang in my ears: “Don’t you want anything?”
I had taken this time to fall in love instead—in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death—the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human—feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light—all of it part of navigating the unknown.
Look what happens when you dream.
She had needed the time to know that this love would not destroy her,
was done yearning for them, needing them to yearn for me. Though I still would. Though they still would. Always.
