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He doesn’t even know her name.
As far as anyone can tell, this is one girl with no interest in being found.
You have to understand, I didn’t give him that name out of fear or reverence, or some misguided sense of propriety.
Warm, loving people who desperately need approval from others fall victim to Stockholm syndrome, while the rest of us fall to pragmatism.
“Welcome to the Butterfly Garden.” I turned to ask her what that meant, but then I saw it.
I’m engaging in a discussion about perspective and moral relativity.”
You learn things over time, and that was one of the biggest things I learned about him. He wanted to find more joy in life than he did.
“I had a life before, you know. Life didn’t begin at the Garden. Well, not this Garden anyway.”
Some wanted the freedom to be anyone they wanted, some of us wanted the freedom to be left alone.
He believed a person’s work was a better judge than their words, and he appraised people accordingly.
Why cause yourself more pain by remembering what you don’t get to have anymore?”
One of the nice things about New York was that no one ever asked questions. It’s just one of those places people go to, you know? It’s a dream, it’s a goal, it’s a place you can disappear amidst millions of other people doing the same thing. No one cares where you came from or why you left because they’re too focused on themselves and what they want and where they’re going. New York has so much history, but everyone in it just wants to know about the future. Even when you’re from New York City, you can still go to ground somewhere else and they may never find you.
It’s about the eyes, really. If you’ve seen enough, you just look older, no matter what the rest of your face looks like.
“I wasn’t worried about being found; to be found, someone has to be looking for you.”
Who you are isn’t a name but it is a history,
Beauty loses its meaning when you’re surrounded by too much of it.
Justice is a faulty thing at the best of times, and it doesn’t actually fix anything.”
Let’s call me a shadow child, overlooked rather than broken.
Sometimes you can look at a wedding and realize with a certain sense of resignation that any children produced in that marriage will inevitably be fucked up and fucked over. It’s a fact, not a sense of foreboding so much as a grim acceptance that these two people should not—but definitely will—reproduce.
So not only was I self-sufficient, I came to have a pretty low opinion of most people’s intelligence.
Like beauty, desperation and fear were as common as breathing.
“Please don’t forget me. Don’t let him be the only one to remember me.”
The book she kept under her pillows turned out to be the Bible, with five years of rage and despair and hope scrawled around the verses.
She was incapable of insulting us, because the words have to have meaning to hurt.
Beautiful things are short-lived,
Not because anything’s ever happened, but because he knows he’d lose it if anything ever did.
“Some people stay broken. Some pick up the pieces and put them back together with all the sharp edges showing.”
They’d pace and rage and pound the walls, but at the end, if their hands and hearts were sore, they were at least a little further from breaking.
and she’d listen to you pour your heart out, without saying a word.
Utterly innocent, incapable of comprehending the bad things. When they happened to her, they touched her lightly and then let her go. In a way, I think she was the happiest of us, purely because she didn’t know any other way to be.”
It’s easier for the horrors to catch up once you have nothing to do.
Do we have a perfect job? No. Do we do a perfect job? No. It isn’t possible. But we do our job, and at the end of the day, we do a hell of a lot more good than harm.
“You seem to have this strange image of me as a lost child, like I’ve just been thrown on the side of the road like garbage, or roadkill, but kids like me? We’re not lost. We may be the only ones who never are. We always know exactly where we are and where we can go. And where we can’t.”
“If you expect to be overlooked or forgotten, you’re always at least a little surprised when someone remembers you. You’re always outside understanding those strange creatures who actually expect people to remember and come back.”
and Mama always says, where there’s life there’s hope. I’ll hope.”
You find more meaning than others.”
Body language was better than a flashing light for warnings.
Even then, all I could think was Thank God.
The ability to say whatever the fuck I want to without worrying about reprisals,
So perhaps there was illusion in here after all, but it was our illusion, not one he’d manufactured for us.
“You are quite unlike any of the others,”
The only thing that made me truly different was that I was the only one who never cried. Who never could.
You keep their secrets, and apparently mine as well, but you give no one else secrets to keep for you.”
“My secrets are old friends; I would feel like a poor friend if I abandoned them now.”
your life before is your own.”
Does ‘justice’ change any of what he did? Any of what we went through?
Even when she seems forthcoming, her answers almost always veer sideways, providing something like substance without giving away the heart.
Sometimes the illusion of freedom, of choice, was more painful than captivity.
She’s strong and brave and resourceful, not above a certain level of emotional manipulation,
but I’d lived through bad things before getting there, so I’d lived through bad things before coming here.
