Jay > Jay's Quotes

“We don't get to choose what hurts us”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“She’s never liked us much, not since she complained that there were no boys on the island, and Reese gave her the blankest look I’ve ever seen and said, “Plenty of girls, though.”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“I think I’d been looking for it all my life
a storm in my body to match the one in my head.”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“Byatt’s carved her initials over and over. BW. BW. BW. She does that everywhere. On the bunk, on her desk in every class we had, on the trees in the grove by the water. Marking Raxter as hers, and sometimes I think if she asked, I’d let her do the same to me.”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“I miss the north side cliff and the waves below, and I miss the way the wind steals your breath like it never belonged to you in the first place.”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“Usually, it was an accident. A lie I never set out to tell. A trick I never meant to play. I’d open my mouth, and something strange would come out, new and not mine. Like there was someone else inside.”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“I’ve spent every day since I met her telling myself the wrong thing. Telling myself over and over that she was cold, when maybe she was burning the whole time.”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“I’m still bitter,” I say. “Nobody ever gave me anything for my first.” Byatt laughs, her hands moving quick to open the soup can, and she gives me the lid. “There. My gift to you.”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“I couldn't take my eyes off her the whole night, It was like she made sense, finally, in her father's house, with mismatched furniture and the back door thrown open.”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“For a second I can see it all laid out across her. The longing and the resignation and the betrayal, the sting of watching the island she loves steal the people she pretends she doesn't.”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“Reese says my name once, just once. Stern and strong, and she believes I can do this, so I have to.”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“But Byatt's our girl." I'm watching Reese's face, and I have her. I know I do. "We are supposed to protect her. Just like she'd do it for us." I take a deep breath. "Just like I'd do it for you.”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“Reese is trying, but she can’t get it quite right, because nobody’s Byatt but Byatt, not even the girl in these memories. There’s this place in her, somewhere nobody can touch, not me or Reese or anyone. It’s just hers, and I don’t even know what it is, really, just that it’s there, and that she takes it with her when she goes.”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“I love her so much more when she's not here.”
― Rory Power, Burn Our Bodies Down

“That yes, it’s exactly what they think, and nothing like it, and a hundred other things at once. I will always wish I were hers, and I will always want to be only my own. I haven’t found a way yet to make the two fit.”
― Rory Power, Burn Our Bodies Down

“I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere - be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“I never wanted to be saved. I wanted someone to follow me down into the darkness.”
― Leah Raeder, Black Iris

“Girls love each other like animals. There is something ferocious and unself-conscious about it. We don't guard ourselves like we do with boys. No one trains us to shield our hearts from each other. With girls, it's total vulnerability from the beginning. Our skin is bare and soft. We love with claws and teeth and the blood is just proof of how much. It's feral.

And it's relentless.”
― Leah Raeder, Black Iris

“In a typical college romance novel, he'd be a gorgeous but troubled sex god who'd cure all my deep-seated psych issues with a good hard fuck. I'd smell his misogyny and abusive tendencies from miles off but my brain would turn to hormone soup because abs. That's the formula. Broken girl + bad boy = sexual healing. All you need to fix that tragic past is a six-pack. More problems? Add abs.

It's Magic Dick Lit.”
― Leah Raeder, Black Iris

“The clearest sign of coming catastrophe is when all the bad shit in your life suddenly stops. You’re entering the eye of the shitstorm.”
― Leah Raeder, Black Iris