Simply Sam’s Reviews > When We Were Animals > Status Update

No quotes this time. I'm just elated to be 3/4 of the the way through this one. Don't get me wrong. I love some of these. But an entire book where nearly every sentence is meant to be thought provokingly insightful and poignant? Not to mention a tad bit pretentious? It gets tough to get through. I am skimming now just to find out what in the world happens to Lumen and Blackhat Roy..

I couldn’t hear for all the horror happening in my head. I didn’t think. I couldn’t tell what was happening. All I knew was ravenous hunger. I wanted to eat that little-boy soul. I wanted to chew it up and swallow it so that maybe he could be a little stronger, or so that maybe the world could.

We live our lives by measures of weeks, months, years, but the creatures we truly are, those are exposed in fractions of moments.

It was possible, I saw now, to be a grotesque, to be huge and free, to wander the streets in utter freedom despite your atrocity, as long as you did it when everybody else was sealed inside their little lit boxes.Now it made sense—why monsters came out at night.

“How do you draw such straight lines without a ruler?” he asked. “Your triangles are amazing.”He ran his fingertips lightly over my triangles, as though geometry were a tactile thing.“They’re perfect,” he said.“They’re not perfect.”He eyed me.“Maybe you don’t know what perfect is,” he said. “Those right there—that’s what perfect looks like.” Every girl needs a Petey at one time...

Sometimes, when I was a girl, I climbed onto the roof through the gabled window of my second-story bedroom. From the chimney peak, I could see all the way up and down the street. It was as tall as my world got, and it was wonderful.

On the other hand, to be bound by your own fate, to feel the eager lashes of a grinning world all up and down your nerve endings. To bleed—to make others bleed. To know there is no end of things. To become something that you can never unbecome. There are in the world sufferings that are not stage pieces but rather whole lives. I have a feeling I'm going to love this.