Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway Quotes

“People think live is, you know, this spiritual thing, "the lama said. "This 'feeling'. But that's not my thing. In my book, love is physical act. Love is not ethereal. Love is sticking by someone when they're in the nuthouse. Love is when you keep calling someone when they don't call you back. Love is dirty and solid. Love is, you know, earth and shit and blood and hair.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Did I really think it was wonderful? Wonderful was probably an exaggeration. I thought it was fine. Maybe even good. I couldn't say the last time I thought anything was exactly wonderful. That implied more joy than I may ever have felt.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“We all want to be someone else. And sometimes we succeed in convincing ourselves we can be.
But it doesn't last, and our true selves, broken and scarred, always win out in the end.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Happiness is the temporary result of denying the knowledge one already has.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Is the thing we love always our downfall? Always our destruction?”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“If you hate yourself enough, you’ll start to hate anyone who reminds you of you. And if you stick with it, you’ll come to hate anyone who doesn’t see how just awful you are.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“The law was for people who needed instructions, she would later tell me. The same people who needed to be told not to put a baby in the dryer or a dog in the microwave.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“We all want to be someone else. And sometimes we succeed in convincing ourselves we can be. But it doesn’t last, and our own true selves, broken and scarred, always win out in the end.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“He leaned over and kissed me — not for the first time, but it still felt like something. Like something I don't remember having felt before, or at least for a long time. Like a door had been opened that had been shut so long ago that I forgot it was there, and whatever was behind that door was younger and brighter and less burdened than what I'd becom”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“People think love is, you know, this spiritual thing,” the lama said. “This feeling. But that’s not my thing. In my book, love is a physical act. Love is not ethereal. Love is sticking by someone when they’re in the nuthouse. Love is when you keep calling someone even when they don’t call you back. Love is dirty and solid. Love is, you know, earth and shit and blood and hair.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“The detective thinks he is investigating a murder or a missing girl but truly he is investigating something else all together, something he cannot grasp hold of directly. satisfaction will be rare. Uncertainty will be your normal state. Much of your life will be spent in the dark woods, no path visible, with fear and loneliness your only companions.
But answers exist. Solutions wait for you, trembling, pulling you to them, calling your name, even if you cannot hear. And when you are sure that you have been forgotten, and that every step has been wrong, and that the woods are swallowing you whole, remember this: I too was once in those woods, and I have emerged to give you, if not a map or a path, hopefully at least a few clues. Remember that I, if no one else, know you are there, and will never give up hope for you, not in this lifetime or the next. And the day I came out of the woods I saw the sun as I had never seen it before, which is the only consolation I can offer as of now.
I believe that someday, perhaps many lifetimes from now, all will be explained, and all mysteries will be solved. All knowledge will be free for the taking, including the biggest mystery of all - who we really are. But for now, each detective, alone in the woods, must take her clues, and solve her mysteries herself.
- Jacques Silette, Detection”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Mysteries never end," Silette wrote. "And we solve them anyway, knowing we are both solving both everything and nothing. We solve them knowing the world will surely be as poorly or even worse off than before. But this is the piece of life we have been given authority over, nothing else; and while we may ask why over and over, no one yet has been given an answer.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“The teller has no responsibility to make the listener believe in the truth. Each must take the words and make them their own. No one can do this for another.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“There are no coincidences. Only doors you didn't have the courage to walk through. only blind spots you weren't brave enough to see. Only tones you refused to admit you could hear.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Most people wouldn't know the truth if it bit them in the ass and paid for the privilege.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Happiness," Silette wrote, "is the temporary result of denying the knowledge one already has.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Because we’d all been handed heaven on a silver platter, and instead we’d kicked it away and asked for hell.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“No one knows how to feel anything anymore. No one knows anymore. Ain’t no one care. People have, like, experiences. Everything just another experience. They do things, but they don’t feel it. It just all goes right through them. Like they a ghost. Like we all ghosts.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Men had all kinds of desires, and if you let them, they would take that desire and put it squarely on your back, making it yours to carry. They would hand it all right over to you, this giant mess you could never hope to contain or control. It would take you over, if you let it. And I knew their desire was not always in a straight line, that sometimes it could fold back on itself, eat itself alive. It wasn’t enough for them to want some of you; they needed you to want some of them, to care enough to hurt them, or let them hurt you.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“I’d met him about five years back on the Case of the Kleptomaniacal Occultist,”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“There’s a demon named Kali; he loves slaughterhouses and gold. He likes to gamble and he likes to fuck things up.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“I was watching Iggy Pop videos on Youtube and trying to research miniature horse suicides.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Karma is not a sentence already printed. It is a series of words that authors can arrange as she chooses.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Soon enough my mind hooked onto the missing guitars and the locked door and the hole filled up with clues and suspects and all the detective stuff and I could pretend it was just another case.
The guitars. The lock. The keys. The gun. The musician in the drawing room with the gun. The duchess in the kitchen with the guitar. I let my mind fill with the case. It was only a case. Only another case. Another sentence of words to arrange.
Maybe that was all there was to life. One long case, only you kept switching roles. Detective, witness, client, suspect. Then one day I'd be the victim instead of the detective or the client and it would all be over. Then I'd finally have a fucking day off.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Mysteries never end," Constance Darling, Silette's student, told me once, "And I always thought maybe none of them really get solved, either. We only pretend we understand when we can't bear it anymore. We close the file and close the case, but that doesn't mean we've found the truth, Claire. It only means that we've given up up on this mystery and decided to loo for truth someplace else.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Karma," he said once, "is not a sentence already printed. It is a series of words the author can arrange as she choses."
Love. Murder. A broken heart. The professor in the drawing room with candlestick. The detective in the bar with the gun. The guitar player backstage with the pick.
Maybe it was true: Life was a series of words we'd been given to arrange as we pleased, only no one seemed to know how. A word game with no right solution, a crossword puzzle where we couldn't quite remember the name of that song.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Constance helped Mick see that there are never any sides. Only things we understand and things we have chosen to pretend we don't understand. Only those we admit we love and those we pretend we don't recognize.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“... solutions are always possible, and the limits of the truth far exceed the limits of human understanding.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Wasn't solving mysteries important? Didn't the truth matter? Of course, Silette had foreseen this. He knew the truth was, and always would be, the most unpopular point of view. "If there is anything that can unify us," he wrote to Constance during the Paris uprising, already old and bitter, "it is our love of deceit and lies, and our abhorrence of the truth.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Samsāra was one name for the wheel of life and death, the stupidity we wander through, lost, until we find enlightenment and get to join with the divine. All the shit that hurts so much. The big things like death and loss and pain and also just the everyday grind of eating and sleeping and wanting and wanting and wanting—that was samsāra. You were supposed to want to get out of it. You were supposed to look for the exit, the golden ticket that could take you to the chocolate factory. Escape from New York. This way to the egress.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway