More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“As if you could fight me off,”
I’d never seen him so completely freed of that carefully cultivated façade.
Face ashen, eyes wide, I sat like a bird locked in the eyes of a snake.
“So what you’re saying is, I’m your brand of heroin?”
Emmett has been on the wagon longer, so to speak, and he understood what I meant. He says twice, for him, once stronger than the other.”
“Even the strongest of us fall off the wagon, don’t we?”
Emmett… these were strangers he happened across.
“To me, it was like you were some kind of demon, summoned straight from my own personal hell to ruin me. The fragrance coming off your skin… I thought it would make me deranged that first day. In that one hour, I thought of a hundred different ways to lure you from the room with me, to get you alone. And I fought them each back, thinking of my family, what I could do to them. I had to run out, to get away before I could speak the words that would make you follow.…”
“By the next morning I was in Alaska.”
In the pure air of the mountains it was hard to believe you were so irresistible.
Jessica’s mind… her mind isn’t very original,
And I was filled with compassion for his suffering, even now, as he confessed his craving to take my life.
“The thought of you, still, white, cold… to never see you blush scarlet again, to never see that flash of intuition in your eyes when you see through my pretenses… it would be unendurable.”
“You are the most important thing to me now. The most important thing to me ever.”
“And so the lion fell in love with the lamb…,” he murmured.
“I’m not used to feeling so human. Is it always like this?”
“I’ll show you how I travel in the forest.”
“Come on, little coward, climb on my back.”
If I’d ever feared death before in his presence, it was nothing compared to how I felt now.
He streaked through the dark, thick underbrush of the forest like a bullet, like a ghost. There was no sound, no evidence that his feet touched the earth. His breathing never changed, never indicated any effort. But the trees flew by at deadly speeds, always missing us by inches.
And then his cold, marble lips pressed very softly against mine.
It would cause me physical pain to be separated from him now.
“There’s nothing like an unsolved mystery to keep you up at night.”
“I was born in Chicago in 1901.”
“Carlisle found me in a hospital in the summer of 1918. I was seventeen, and dying of the Spanish influenza.”
“Your parents?” “They had already died from the disease. I was alone. That was why he chose me. In all the chaos of the epidemic, no one would ever realize I was gone.”
“He acted from loneliness. That’s usually the reason behind the choice. I was the first in Carlisle’s family, though he found Esme soon after. She fell from a cliff. They brought her straight to the hospital morgue, though, somehow, her heart was still beating.”
“Carlisle brought Rosalie to our family next. I didn’t realize till much later that he was hoping she would be to me what Esme was to him—he was careful with his thoughts around me.”
“But she was never more than a sister. It was only two years later that she found Emmett. She was hunting—we were in Appalachia at the time—and found a bear about to finish him off. She carried him back to Carlisle, more than a hundred miles, afraid she wouldn’t be able to do it herself. I’m only beginning to guess how difficult that journey was for her.”
“She saw something in his face that made her strong enough. And they’ve been together ever since. Sometimes they live separately from us, as a married couple. But the younger we pretend to be, the longer we can stay in any given place. Forks seemed perfect, so we all enrolled in high school.”
“Alice and Jasper are two very rare creatures. They both developed a conscience, as we refer to it, with no outside guidance. Jasper belonged to another… family, a very different kind of family. He became depressed, and he wandered on his own. Alice found him. Like me, she has certain gifts above and beyond the norm for our kind.”
She sees things—things that might happen, things that are coming. But it’s very subjective. The future isn’t set in stone. Things change.”
“She saw Jasper and knew that he was looking for her before he knew it himself. She saw Carlisle and our family, and they came together to find us. She’s most sensitive to non-humans. She always sees, for example, when another group of our kind is coming near. And any threat they may pose.”
We’ve only found one other family like ours, in a small village in Alaska. We lived together for a time, but there were so many of us that we became too noticeable. Those of us who live… differently tend to band together.”
“Nomads, for the most part. We’ve all lived that way at times. It gets tedious, like anything else. But we run across the others now and then, because most of us prefer the North.”
There’s a reason why we chose the Olympic Peninsula, one of the most sunless places in the world.
“No, and that is a mystery. Alice doesn’t remember her human life at all. And she doesn’t know who created her. She awoke alone. Whoever made her walked away, and none of us understand why, or how, he could. If she hadn’t had that other sense, if she hadn’t seen Jasper and Carlisle and known that she would someday become one of us, she probably would have turned into a total savage.”
“You spied on me?”
I was flattered.
“I come here almost every night.”
“You’re interesting when you sleep.”
I felt his hand, lighter than a moth’s wing,
“The glory of first love, and all that. It’s incredible, isn’t it, the difference between reading about something, seeing it in the pictures, and experiencing it?”
“For almost ninety years I’ve walked among my kind, and yours… all the time thinking I was complete in myself, not realizing what I was seeking. And not finding anything, because you weren’t alive yet.”
“Just because I’m resisting the wine doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the bouquet,”
Carlisle has a theory… he believes that we all bring something of our strongest human traits with us into the next life, where they are intensified—like our minds, and our senses. He thinks that I must have already been very sensitive to the thoughts of those around me. And that Alice had some precognition, wherever she was.”
“Carlisle brought his compassion. Esme brought her ability to love passionately. Emmett brought his strength, Rosalie her… tenacity.
“Jasper is very interesting. He was quite charismatic in his first life, able to influence those around him to see things his way. Now he is able to manipulate the emotions of those around him—calm down a room of angry people, for example, or excite a lethargic crowd, conversely. It’s a very subtle gift.”
Or, if you don’t believe that all this world could have just happened on its own, which is hard for me to accept myself, is it so hard to believe that the same force that created the delicate angelfish with the shark, the baby seal and the killer whale, could create both our kinds together?”
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll just assume it’s something much worse than it is,”
