Here Beside the Rising Tide Quotes

“An amalgamation of selves in the same Jenn shell. Evolved. Evolving. The electricity came back, and she was Magnanimous. She was flexible and forgiving. Chuck could take his List of Underminstances and shove it. His list. His underminstances. His resentments to carry, if he chose that burden. She brushed her bitterness aside. She preferred sweet.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“But life is absurd. We have to revel in the absurdity.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“You don’t have to come back. We’ll probably just slow you down. If you can find a way off on your own, you should take it.” “But I—I want to come back.” He gazed down at her, his dark eyes ardent. His shirt had gotten torn, somehow, in the battle, revealing the bronzed brawny chest beneath. “I—” want that, too, she thought, but then his lips were pressed against hers. His arms encircled her waist. He lifted her up. He kissed her, deeply, the way she’d always wanted to be kissed, as if it was the last kiss ever on planet Earth.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“She hadn’t understood when she swam out. She had acted on impulse. But she knew, the moment she touched the creature’s silky swirly skin, the moment her mind wove all the threads together, that this part of the story had already been written. They would stand and fight. Jenn and her kids, Timmy, the contractor, his grandma, his grandma’s friends, and the collective of time-jump squidinox, a noble assemblage of lumps and limbs, small and mighty.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“She let her mind loosen. To save the world, she thought. She felt their minds in her mind. A tidal wave of thoughts and memories, prophecies, dreams. Worlds upon worlds upon worlds. A thousand different seas.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“How lonely Timmy felt. She knew. Though he didn’t say it. His mother was gone. Her mother was gone. Time slipped on without them.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“She didn’t believe in fauns and fairies now, but she had as a child. She didn’t believe in time travel either, but on the beach behind her was the traveler.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“She pressed forward. Through the waves. Beneath. Where sound distorted. Where the steady beat of waves mingled with the woosh of the undertow, the glub glub of her escaping breath, the fast track of her own heart pumping blood through her veins. She came up. Inhaled deep. The air was salty and sweet, rank, strange. Unfamiliar, as if a vent had opened and the air that blew through its ducts came from a distant world, a world like this one, but where the story had already ended, and badly. She didn’t want that ending.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“If she believed in miracles, the miraculous might occur.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“She knew she could not look directly at the monster, but she had seen it. There was no escape.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“She beamed. Her radiant eyes looked upon the great weird swarm with pride and joy. Her mother looked upon her and felt the same. She felt astounded and grateful for this moment, this streak of sunlight before that dark storm rolled back out of the sea. She would do better, she told herself, if she got the chance. She would listen. To her children. To herself. To the chatter and music all around her, everything she had tried so hard to tune out, because some of it was sad and dark. But darkness came with the light.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“I—I guess you never know what will happen. You can try your best and have hope, but sometimes, no matter what you do—” “The unstoppable beast shows up.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“They all believed in monsters, in a world where monsters were stories that mothers told their children weren’t real.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“To put it another way, are you letting your Child Self decide how your Adult Self lives? Let’s break the cycle. Let’s make our selves be friends.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“It was over. Chuck had moved out. She was stranded with the kids on Danger Island. They both felt bad, but there was nothing to be done. Not anymore. Their lives had turned out the way their lives turned out. The phone felt heavy in her hand. A dead weight. Transmitting silence. She stared out at the sea, that blue expanse, awash with life, immensely empty. White seagulls circled overhead. Waves sloshed at the shore. There was no boat back, not one that she would take. There was no bridge to connect them.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“If they had both gazed through and past each other, their phantom selves passing in the hallways of their house without a word. If they had loved each other. It didn’t feel like love now. Love was an ocean away.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“She could hear the excited tenor of his voice, but the words eluded her. She scrolled back through visions of Chuck, but all the visions had the same washed-out haze, the features undefinable, the Chuck figure existing as a proxy for something or someone else. She didn’t know what.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“She could hear him breathing into the phone. But his breath was just noise. His words were just words. Chuck had dumped her, and in his absence, he lost dimensionality. He became a paper doll cutout. A caricature of a man. The real him was obscured beneath flurries of texts, grievances, papers served, feelings hurt, until there was, in her mind, no real him left.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“Jenn’s frayed subconscious was the mélange of trauma and rejection left to grow and fester in her long hours and years of pretending everything was A-OK. Like now. Her in screenland. The kids delivered safely to screenland. All of them lost there, practicing the art of coping in the American way, gratified by shiny sugary distraction.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“She waited for something to happen. A sign. Anything to relieve the pressure of having to figure out the next right move. Every move felt wrong after she made it. She had no battle plan. She had not been properly trained for whatever this was.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“She shouldn’t think about the contractor. Not now. In this Time of Panic. Or ever. She was too old. She was stuck out in Cougarville. She had a Chuck-shaped chance and she lost it, and maybe that meant something. About her capacity to love. Her aptitude for anything other than work. Her ability to differentiate the fictional universe in which she largely resided from the facts of her broken life. To recognize that fact and fiction should stick to their own separate tracks. She was, in this respect, like her children.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“The sea was stark and beautiful and danger lurked beneath its placid waves. Fake it till you make it, the sea said to itself, looking pretty, but deep down it was dark and full of wicked things.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“She should be inside now, on the couch with her children, holding them, comforting them, providing the explanation appropriate for their age. If she knew what that was.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“And all this chaos beset our little hunk of rock, our comely planet, hurtling through space on its improbable journey as a spawner and hoarder of life. Life was a losing battle, really. Everything else out there in the vast beyond was so lifeless and empty. Mostly, a person had to look away. But there came a moment, or many moments, when a person had to extract their proverbial head from the sand and set aside their screens and remove their headphones and stand witness. Here was that moment. And while the youngest among them took refuge in his mother’s arms, the rest watched.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“And then what if…what if something like that happens to me? Or you or, or what if—” “It won’t. I promise. It won’t,” Jenn promised, though she knew this was a promise that she couldn’t keep. The girl was old enough that she knew so, too. But Jenn still made this promise, the way her own mother had made it to her, and the girl still nodded and buried her face in the crook of her mother’s arm and let her mother hold her. “I promise. I’ll do everything I can to keep you safe.” “I know. But…I’m scared,” Evie said. “I know.” Scared was a permanent feature of being sentient in a volatile universe.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“A tragedy, Jenn wanted to say, as she gathered the girl in her arms, as she held the girl close. Tragic. But a thing that happened to other people, people whose names they didn’t know, whose faces they didn’t see. It wouldn’t happen to them. To her. She was safe.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“It’s not any single thing. It’s just that, well, people change over time. I’m not the same me. Dad’s not the same Dad. And sometimes when people change, they grow in different directions. They don’t fit together anymore. And there’s nothing anyone can do to change that. But it’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just a thing that happens.” “I wish things like that didn’t happen.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“The girl was ten. The top of her head was as high as her mother’s shoulder. But she seemed taller now. Her features more angular. Her expression contemplative, poised. And behind the stratum of girl, if Jenn looked at the right angle, she could glimpse the woman this girl would become.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“She would never win Mother of the Year. But she would win points. The kids would use her benevolent sugar stance against Chuck. Mom lets us have cookies with lunch they would say, and her heart would be full.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“My power sandwich.” She laughed, remembering the name she had given it as a child, on the beach in her neon surf-cat swimsuit, her arms strong and tan, her heart still hopeful, her best friend there at her side.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide