The Vanishers Quotes

“He was uninterested in art, politics, culture, people. While his brain burrowed through rock toward a very specific knowledge goal, mine preferred to warren the air; his brain operated a drill bit while mine launched a thousand aimless kites that tangled strings or bounced along the invisible currents, disconnected and alone. Cognitively, we were the gravitational negatives of each other. Sometimes I wished I had his brain. But only sometimes. He suffered due to his specialized excesses; he just suffered differently from me.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

“... but as with so may diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that matter, not the cause, because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be sickened by an illness known as you.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

“Or perhaps it was the crying woman's mention of the unread library books, because truly there was nothing sadder, except a gift that a person has hand made for you, a scarf or a poncho, that, try as you might, you cannot ever see your way into wearing. This is when the cold indifference of the world envelops you, and makes you feel invigorated by emotion but also acutely alone.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

“But my illness, even in its absence, made it hard for me to enjoy life. Good health means being unaware of one’s health. I was not yet unaware.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

“To kill yourself was to say to your family members, I can no longer live with myself. To vanish was to say, I can no longer live with you.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

“and maybe it was the spirit of her dead mother sickening her, or maybe it was her inability to grieve a person she should, by biological rights, have grieved, but as with so many diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that matter, not the cause, because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be sickened by an illness known as you.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

“Alwyn’s mother could not square her identity as a sexualized woman with that of being a mother,”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

“People accuse therapists of seeing abuse where there isn’t any; of fabricating memories for their patients. Maybe this is true. But if so, it’s because neurosis without a perceptible cause is very hard to accept. How does one fix a problem that arose from nothing?”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

“These people,” she said. “These people who die and you never knew them. What are you supposed to feel?” She really wanted me to tell her. She really thought that I would know. “Nothing,” I said, tossing the key on her bed. “You’re not supposed to feel anything.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

“You are a medium,” Marta said. “Although so is everybody a medium, an involuntary host to free-floating misery. But you’re a more available one.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

“Alwyn’s beauty came and went depending on how much sleep she’d had, or how much water she’d drunk, or how many people she’d annoyed that day, and this made a person want to keep examining her face because it was never the same.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

“Of the many mysteries attending Plath (for example, whether or not she’d meant to kill herself—she’d stuck her head in the oven, true, but had left a note for her neighbor instructing him to “call Dr. Horder,” a note she possibly expected him to find in time to save her), this was the one that most fascinated me—no matter how many photographs I’d seen of her, I had no idea what she looked like. Each new photograph undermined the believability of the others, as though she’d been, even while alive, unwilling to commit to her own face.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

“she’d been building to what was known as a psychic cascade, when a person’s superior abilities have been utilized for silly tasks, thereby causing a surplus of energy to accumulate.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

“Because the doctors could not cure me, they decided I could not be sick. They told me it was all in my head. Namely, I was to blame. I was the sickness.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers