The Boys of My Youth Quotes

“We sit silently in our living room. He watches the mute television screen and I watch him. The planes and ridges of his face are more familiar to me than my own. I understand that he wishes even more than I do that he still loved me.”
― Jo Ann Beard, The Boys of My Youth

“In a few hours the world will resume itself, but for now we’re in a pocket of silence. We’re in the plasmapause, a place of equilibrium, where the forces of the earth meet the forces of the sun. I imagine it as a place of stillness, where the particles of dust stop spinning and hang motionless in deep space.”
― Jo Ann Beard, The Boys of My Youth

“As she lies in the bed she weeps, for Bing, for the melting, shimmering candles, the filigree on the holiday tablecloth. She is an unwilling astronaut, bumping against the thick glass of the ship, her line tangling lazily in zero gravity, face mask fogged with fear. My sister reaches across, over the bed, and we both embrace the mother, holding her on earth, pulling her onto the ship, breathing our oxygen into her line. Ten hours later she is dead.”
― Jo Ann Beard, The Boys of My Youth

“I thought to myself, not for the first time in this life, Everything is perfect; all those things that I always think are so bad really aren’t bad at all. Then I noticed that out my window the clouds had parted, the clear night sky was suddenly visible, and the moon — a garish yellow disk against a dark wall — seemed to be looking at me funny.”
― Jo Ann Beard, The Boys of My Youth