Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart Quotes

“Humans can grow bored of all things, somehow. This is one of our great blessings. They say that art, that beauty, is what allows us to endure times of great horror—but no. It is our bottomless capacity for boredom.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“Branches will extend into her fingertips and her knees, bloom into her throat, filling the emptiness her beloved's abandonment gouged out.
No more hollows. No more need. Only a sapling, thorny with claws, widening by the day.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“Horribly, it's very easy to be in love with someone you don't particularly like. The woman loves him the way a honeybee loves the sting--fevered for contact, willing to tug its own guts out in the process.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“We all feel beholden to those we love, even when they can give us nothing in return.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“Monsters and flowers aren't much different.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“If nobody really knows you, then no one knows if you're telling the truth. And if no one knows if you're telling the truth, you can decide what the truth is, and what it isn't. You have the control. Even when the water is rising.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“There is wanting and then there is wanting. It's ridiculous that the word want covers so much. Like, wanting a cool car is not the same thing as wanting Quinn. One of those is surface, material. The other kind of want is molecular. It's more like a tug. Like all these fishing lines are hooking into me and yanking. You can decide to want a car. You can't decide to want a person. Not in the same way.

[...]

Maybe this is the difference between want and yearn: Want can be flipped on and off like a fuse. Want can be indulged in or set aside. Yearn is something else. You can hear it in the shape of the word. It sounds like the noise a person might make while lying on their stomach on the rim of a well, and reaching down into it, toward the dark. The little grunt they might emit as they reached and reached down into the belly of the well but never quite caught whatever it was they were reaching for.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“We refer to them only as "the War." This is because one experiencing war cannot fathom that anyone else in history has ever existed in such a heightened state as this. Though we know, through logic and reason and literary documentation, that we are not, in fact, singular--the heart disagrees. No war could be more sanguinary. More storied. Yes this is The War. The only war that ever has been or will be--because it is ours.

In this way, war is like love.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“The more I grow to love a man, the less I tend to like him.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“It's true--you can't really be angry with someone without loving them first.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“Why be a girl, cooed Mister Pluvio, when you could be a terror?”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“Oliver had always known that a time might come when perhaps, the world might need devouring. When the world would grow old and sad and sick, and too full of the wrong sorts of hungers. This was his art, after all. He was a master at knowing the moment when death stopped being a tragedy and became, instead, a gift. And if that time came for the whole of the world—he would be ready.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“The people, they want to be either here or there. Feet firmly on one shore or another. For in the middle of two shores is the sea, and the sea is unknowable, and inconstant, and cannot be controlled.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“What is a monster but someone who can see this world from both sides? Even you must know that. You, who live half in life, half in death. What is a monster if not someone, some thing, caught between?”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“We are never afraid of a thing on its own, as it is. We’re afraid of something intruding in a context in which it doesn’t belong. What is a monster? It’s a contradiction. A creature who houses two dissonant aspects.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“Fact: Ghosts do not belong only to the dead. They belong to whatever is absent. A sweetheart. A misplaced key. A hometown you fled in a glinting jet plane while swearing never, never to return.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“What is the most hideous thing you ever nurtured? What shape is a phantom limb? What wine pairs best with the most lonesome meal? What is enough?”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“Maybe this is the difference between want and yearn: Want can be flipped on and off like a fuse. Want can be indulged in or set aside. Yearn is something else. You can hear it in the shape of the word. It sounds like the noise a person might make while lying on their stomach on the rim of a well, and reaching down into it, toward the dark. The little grunt they might emit as they reached and reached down into the belly of the well but never quite caught whatever it was they were reaching for.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“This is because one experiencing war cannot fathom that anyone else in history has ever existed in such a heightened state as this. Though we know, through logic and reason and literary documentation, that we are not, in fact, singular—the heart disagrees. No war could be more sanguinary. More storied. Yes, this is The War. The only war that ever has been or will be—because it is ours. In this way, war is like love.)”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“It’s true—you can’t really be angry with someone without loving them first. Sort of the way that you can’t cook a meal without heating the pan. You have to care to the point that the grease starts spitting up at you in pinpricks, and then, only then, can the anger start.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“War cannot be imagined, for those who have not witnessed it cannot truly fathom it, and for those who have borne witness—it is no longer an imagining. It is a boot print permanently crushed into the heart.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“But there is another sort of dying in between, a crueler death: when those you love begin to make choices they would never make if you were there. If you were alive. Things that would be thought-less, brutal even, but in your absence, become benign. Like giving away your clothes. Or removing the flurries of magazine clippings you carefully curated across your bedroom walls.
Isn't it strange, how the rules change so fast? How an act that would be unacceptable one moment becomes instantly harmless, as soon as the burden of ownership is lifted?”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“How you must have readied the fleece for my arrival. Fed it my name so that when I stepped into that barn, it already knew me, ready to make me fester with obsession so rabidly that I never even saw the wolf prowling at my door. Henrietta, I've been whispering back to it. It's been listening well.
... Don't think of it as a curse. Think of it as a promise. We have already lived so many parallel experiences. My beloved in your bed. My footsteps on your farmland. And now-this. A gift. I'm only returning what was always yours.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“The She-Jacklis is a master of mimicry. It will crawl into the child's empty bed and howl. It will scrawl notes in the missing child's handwriting to slip under every door in the house.
It will put on all the child's clothes, so long untouched in the closet, and will study itself in the mirror for hours.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“If the soul arrives too quickly, before the Panther has had time to feed, the creature will be so overcome with guilt at the sight of its slaughtered prey that it will be unable to eat. It will paw at the mournful earth, burying the bodies, its belly empty.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“When the Wrip-Wender reaches mating age, one head will fall in love with the other. It will spend a fortnight writhing against the earth as that head thrashes toward its twin.
Eventually, they will meet. Fang will meet throat. Desire will meet body. One head will poison the other. Both sides will die”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“Before the Marriage, I was a girl, like you. What, you think this impossible? You think huntresses are one sort and you, something completely different? I understand why you would think that way. It's easier.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“When your teeth sharpen, do they cut your tongue?”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

“There were more beautiful girls, too, who always seemed stickier than other people, easier to snare, as if made of Velcro—the pale-haired dancer whose feet twitched as she slept; the radish farmer who could say thread in seven languages; the anthropology student with exactly seventy-five brown freckles on each cheek. More and more and more small hooks on which his thread caught and stretched outward from his body. More harp strings that yanked him here or there, which grew tighter the farther he moved from whatever or whomever he was tied to. The Thread”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories