The Kiss Quotes

“We're taught to expect unconditional love from our parents, but I think it is more the gift our children give us. It's they who love us helplessly, no matter what or who we are.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“My days are as long as despair can make them.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“The dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“We are, all of us, molded and remolded by those who have loved us, and though that love may pass, we remain none the less their work—a work that very likely they do not recognize, and which is never exactly what they intended. —François Mauriac, The Desert of Love”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“And now you’ll never be able to have anyone else, because you won’t be able to keep our secret. You’ll tell whoever it is, and once he knows, he’ll leave you.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“Someday a sentence will come to me, a magic sentence that will undo all that is wrong and make everything right. But until that sentence comes, I say nothing.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“The three of us spend much of our week together at art museums and botanic gardens and other tourist attractions. We are drawn to these places of silent staring and confused, enervated wandering because they make us seem and feel less like freaks as we stare in speechless shock at one another.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“Who’s normal? Normal is a mathematical concept. It has no bearing on human personality or relationships.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“We’re taught to expect unconditional love from our parents, but I think it is more the gift our children give us. It’s they who love us helplessly, no matter what or who we are.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“I don’t go to graduate school. Instead, I move to New York, the city where I naively imagine writers must go.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“The road always stretches endlessly ahead and behind us, so that we are out of time as well as out of place.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“. I imagine myself stumbling, falling, a victim of my own gravity, of my desire for oblivion, for release from feeling. Because I feel too much—I always have—and it’s impossible to live with my heart always breaking, equally impossible to keep myself anesthetized. If I were to die in a fall from the breakwater, the last thing I’d smell would be the seaweed rotting on the beach. The last thing I’d see would be my mother’s face, like that of a clock: still, flat, and white, marked with the hour of my death.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The kiss

“She will accept, acknowledge, see me only in as much as i will make myself the child who pleases her.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss: A Memoir

“That afternoon, I begin to learn the wisdom of keeping my feelings to myself, a lesson reinforced often during a childhood of female warfare and tricky, shifting alliances, so often that my genius for envasion at last approaches that of my mother. She may sleep with a mask, but by the time I am a teenager I have made one within myself, I have hidden my heart.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“Nights, in my room, I turn the handle of my grandfather’s old-fashioned razor to release the blade from under its stainless steel cover. I trace the sharp edge over my arm, press it into places where a scratch might go unnoticed. It’s not so much a desire for punishment as for manageable pain, bleeding that can be stanched.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss