American Rapture Quotes

“I signed the form as if my whole life hadn't been an unwritten contract ensuring my abstinence anyway. As if my whole value as a person, a future wife, a mortal girl and woman who hopes not to burn in eternal hellfire doesn't lie largely in my intact virginity.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“A Letter to the Reader

I thought my dog dying was going to kill me.

If I’m being honest, I still think it, some days. Most days. If I’m being honest, I still think it every day.

Soul-mutt. Best friend. Not everyone understands, or will. That’s fine. I’ve never been one to want to share in grief, never been one to share much of anything. Only child, writer. A dog removes itself from the pack to lick wounds clean. A dog goes off, alone, to die. But we all know it—a family member, a friend, the sudden glazing of the eyes, the feel of a heart stopping beneath our hand. Our souls and selves dropping pieces each time someone exits this earth. Our identities, foundations shaken. Even sometimes bulldozed to nothing.

This one brought me to my knees. At the time of writing this note, I can honestly say, I have never felt anything like this. I am truly surprised it hasn’t killed me.

I always knew Barghest was going to die.

Barghest’s death was (with the deaths of the others) the worst thing I could think of, and my job as I see it is to explore all the worsts. And all the bests, too. This book, or more accurately, an early, now unrecognizable version of it, was the first thing I ever seriously wrote. It was also what got me started on this path of Writer. Someone read this early snippet and believed in it, in me. This was a story that I wanted to tell from day one, ideas that hounded me then and have for all the years since.

It’s taken ten years, an education, all the events of a decade of life, and more drafts than I’d like to count for me to tell this story in a way that felt right. In a way that is (I hope) befitting of you, most precious reader. And these dogged questions of guilt, shame, faith have nipped at my heels through everything.

Funny, how they always draw just enough blood to keep us from running full tilt.

But now. In the wake of a loss that has shaken me more than any I’ve lived through before, in a moment in which I find myself, like Sophie, questioning everything, questioning what the point of being here is at all, I have to say,

It all feels very human and very small to confine and bind ourselves to anything that seeks to diminish us. This world and universe and existence is so expansive and evolving, and we choose to let ourselves be crippled by someone else’s ideas.

We share life with mortality. We will die. Everyone we love will die. We will all face the dark. Together, or separate. We just don’t know. There is no self-help book, no textbook, no how-to that can tell us, definitively, what comes after. By the time any of us has the answers, we won’t be here to write them. None of us knows, even if we think we do.

But here is what I do know: We live with death. And horror chooses not to turn away from it.

Horror looks the darkness in the eyes. Horror dances with the absence, the loss. Explores ways for us—you, the reader, and me—to take it in our arms and spin around together. Ways to embrace the centrifugal force that is human striving, human searching. Mortal life.

Dogs die. Humans die. We live with it, whether we want to or not.

But from choosing to look, choosing not to turn away, from our embrace in the darkness, I hope that guilt and shame and any idea invented to hold you down in this glorious, nearly blinding existence, will seem, at the end of it all, very, very small.

You, and me, spinning too fast for them to catch us.

Thank you for continuing on this journey with me. With my characters, who are of course, now yours. These questions and worlds that I humbly share with you. That now belong to you.

And while we keep hurtling through the unknown, as we spin round and round, I want to say,

Here’s to dancing, book by book, question by question, through this vast, shining existence.

Together.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“Tasks can carry you through many hours of a life otherwise too empty to contemplate. And books, the right ones, can nearly make you forget what it is you’re trying to forget in the first place.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“Free to live whatever life he wants. There are dangers. There is infection, there is violence, there is weather and the problem of currency and a million forces that could work against them. But maybe none of that matters because he chose it.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“What does it feel like?" My words a whisper.
She smiles at me, and I know I'll remember it for the rest of my life.
"Like wings on the wind, baby.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“You wanna know why I think possession scares you?" Cleo says, elbows resting on her knees, looking at me intently. "It's the same reason they want it to. Because on some level you feel that you've already given up your free will. God and Jesus and the Devil and angels and demons have already infiltrated your thoughts, your whole being. The church has. They make us so afraid of possession, of doing wrong and being wrong, because they don't want us to see they've done it to us already. That fear, guilt, and shame, that has possessed you your entire life. And they put it there. Now tell me who's the one who deserves to go to hell.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“Being your age, it’s the best and the worst. You know what I mean? Like, everything is so intense. So extreme, and it all feels life or death, even when it’s not. Everything does. Exams, friendships, first love. But that’s what’s so great about it. You just feel so alive all the time. You just feel.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“Barghest jumps out first, then waits for me, his big black eyes trained on my face. He can feel how anxious I am, how hopeful. This animal so attuned to me. I am overwhelmed with love for him, I nearly want to cry. I kiss his head and scratch his neck and ears. I tell him I love him so much.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“And … I don’t get it. I mean they all say it’s unnatural, but … what’s so unnatural about dressing up in costumes and putting on a show? Don’t we do that in pageants for the holidays? And a lot of what I’m finding is them just reading books to kids. How can that be so bad? It looks actually … kind of fun.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“The same ones who carry hate in their hearts and call it righteousness,” she says as if it is the simplest thing in the world. “No hate in the world like Christian love.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“I think it’s our job to find hope wherever we can. Especially when life is terrible and dark. It’s our job to find the beauty and the light.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“Catholics are no strangers to darkness and violence. We fill our churches with it and worship it every day.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“But if there’s no tomorrow for you, there’s still a tomorrow for all the people who care about you.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“Why do you think possession is so frightening?”

“Because you lose control over yourself, you lose free will.” Because a demon enters you.

“You wanna know why I think possession scares you?” Cleo says, elbows resting on her knees, looking at me intently. “It’s the same reason they want it to. Because on some level you feel that you’ve already given up your free will. God and Jesus and the Devil and angels and demons have already infiltrated your thoughts, your whole being. The church has. They make us so afraid of possession, of doing wrong and being wrong, because they don’t want us to see they’ve done it to us already. That fear, guilt, and shame, that has possessed you your entire life. And they put it there. Now tell me who’s the one who deserves to go to Hell.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“What god would want you to kill other people for him? People he made. It's all just ... fucking insane."
A Baptist church's front sign reads The Most Power Position Is On Your Knees. Someone has hung a red robe from the side of it.
"Yeah," I reply. "But not to the ones who believe it.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“You don't carry a precious thing to give away only once, and you do not lose value as a human or a woman once you give it. You are a precious thing, you.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“Noah's voice, the wind beating against the window. Birds are always chirping after a storm, telling the world they've made it through. Finding each other. "I'd want to be a bird," I say.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“I can't be here, can't allow this. There is too much at stake, and I can see that he wants the same thing that I do, the same lethal thing. To continue what we started. But the feeling deep down in me, the wanting, it renders me motionless. The wanting is a living thing, like the wind, a separate self from me. Maybe it is all that I am.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“How we have lived through so much together but are still strangers in many ways. It is a crazy thought, how much more we might be able to learn about each other still, if we survive.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“I spent so much time with those useless how-tos, gaining knowledge in other areas, but not the one of my own body. This vessel that is the cause of everything. This is forbidden. I can't read these, can I? Can I afford not to?”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“Could Eve have been sick in the Garden? Is desire an illness in itself?”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“Every square inch of the wood-paneled walls is covered with photographs of cops, some black-and-white, some in color. Red-and-white Ws and America's Dairyland, old flaking signs for Lake Monona, Lake Mendota, and the U.P. Posters, with all kinds of beer, half-nude women holding giant mugs of it. All the color, words, images, the vibrant clutter of them, such a stark contrast to the spare tans, beiges, and wood of our home, our church, the school. My life.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“I will carry my vengeance with me.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“An infinite moment. A threshold. A precipice. We jump together.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“There is nothing complicated here. Just stories, just acceptance, just life.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“While I have turned to hatred these last years, he has found humor, found better ways to survive.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“You know how us Catholic girls can be. —Alanis Morissette”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“Virginity, chastity, purity, men only being with women, women only being with men. How can these things possibly matter when people die, when storms tear walls off homes? When a ten-year-old boy tries to come to terms with the fact that he might not make it to eleven, when another is ripped from his home because he is just a little different. And when one is left bleeding on the ground next to a woman who isn’t his mother by the hand of someone who calls himself righteous.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“All these people. Choking, running for their lives from the one safe place they had. Because one religious group doesn’t believe in offering medicine. Because one religious group has seized on an opportunity to make the world what they want it to be, at the ultimate expense of others. A religious group who are supposed to be my people.”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture

“You don’t carry a precious thing to give away only once, and you do not lose value as a human or a woman once you give it. You are a precious thing, you. And you get to do whatever you want. You matter, and you have to live your life as though you matter. Now and always. I’m not sorry,”
― C.J. Leede, American Rapture