The Night of the Comet Quotes

“This was yet another one of those things that school failed to prepare you for: how to deal with the unpredictable behavior of real people in the real world.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“I’d never thought it was possible for adults, parents like mine and Gabriella’s, to fall in and out of love like teenagers, at least not in any world that I knew. But what if they could? Then what?”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“None of us wanted to be there that day, in our house, as we were. We’d seen joy and happiness and celebration, and the memory of that, the knowledge of how rich life could be, didn’t linger to warm and cheer us. Rather, it did just the opposite. None of us wanted to be us anymore. I wondered how long we’d be able to sustain ourselves, and I imagined, dramatically, the fumes of our dissatisfaction building up inside our house until they exploded, blowing out the roof and walls, leaving nothing but the burnt empty shell of a home.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“Her eyes changed and her face went soft. I saw something there that I’d seen that afternoon in the planetarium, a certain tenderness tinged with sorrow—a depth of feeling that seemed at odds with her youth and beauty, but that also seemed to mirror my own feelings, feelings I hardly recognized in myself until I saw them in her.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“That was the problem with expectations: they were good only as long as they lasted. Better not to expect anything at all. Better to join the cold-blooded, big-eyed creatures slithering in the mud at the bottom of the canal, animals that didn’t have to worry about love and hope and expectation. Because as soon as you grew two legs and learned to walk upright, you were pretty much doomed to a lifetime of disappointments.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“He was strong and unforgiving, a bully, and I saw that he would be that way for the rest of his life; and for this same reason I suspected that he would always be successful in whatever he did, and I despised and feared him for that.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“Gorgeous. Gorgeous home,” my mother had said. Seeing it myself, I understood why she liked visiting here so much, and why she always seemed so disappointed when she returned home to ours. It was obvious, wasn’t it? Who wouldn’t have wanted to trade their lives for this dream?”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“This, I understood in a flash, was why people liked to dance. It made you forget who you were and at the same time remember who you were always meant to be.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“That life wouldn’t get any easier as I got older. If anything, it would only get harder as I grew up to the realization, as he apparently had, that all our beliefs were built on a flimsy scaffolding of stories, and that happiness was nothing but a wish and love was only a lie.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“And here—what do we do? We go to school, come home, go to school, come home. You get to do this every day until you’re old enough to find a job and get married, and then you go to work, come home, go to work, come home. And then your little kids go to school, come home … It’s like you’re digging a hole deeper and deeper into the ground, and pretty soon you’re miles below the surface of the Earth and you forget that there’s even a world outside anymore.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“Through these observations I began to see her as less of a goddess and more of a person. She was funny, thoughtful, at times awkward. She was, in fact, someone not so different from me: a human being trapped inside a teenager’s body, waiting for the world to begin.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“I’d catch her crossing through the patio room, or see her sitting on the couch to watch TV with her parents. Other times I would find her in her bedroom, her shadow flitting back and forth behind the curtains of the French doors. Sometimes the curtains would be open and I could watch her sitting inside, talking on the phone, moving in and out of her powder room. She always closed the curtains before going to bed at night, however—evidence, I thought, of a certain polite modesty that must’ve been taught to well-bred girls like her. Or maybe, I thought, she suspected me; maybe she knew I was watching.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“Sometimes late at night before closing, when the store was empty and there was only the hum of the cooler and a faint buzz from the overhead fluorescent lights to disturb the silence, she would have the feeling that she was perched at the very edge of her dreams. She would stop whatever she was doing and lean on the counter, listening. A Gulf breeze rustled the leaves in the gutter; a train whistled on the outskirts of town. Possibility seemed to shiver in the air, like the electric sensation before a hurricane. Any minute now, she would tell herself, staring out the window, any minute now it would happen. It had to happen. She could feel it like a tingling beneath her skin. Any minute now, the bell would ring, the door would open, and her future would step in to greet her. He’d be wearing a suit and tie, and he’d ask in a polite, gentlemanly voice that sounded at once foreign but completely familiar, “Miss? Hello? Can you help me?”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“This was another thing they failed to teach you at school: what to say, what to do when you were standing side by side with a beautiful girl.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“Lately, I’d begun to suspect that this world of sex was even bigger and more pervasive than I could imagine. It might’ve been everywhere; it was going on all the time, all around me, like a parallel life that was being played out, half seen, on the other side of a thin curtain.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“I just want to know who made the rule that you had to stop having fun once you got married.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“But then you met Dad in the drugstore.” She laughed—not a happy laugh, exactly, but one you might use in talking about an embarrassing incident from your past.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“Leaning in to the mirror, I discovered a small bump on my forehead. I prodded it with my fingertips. It was hard and painful to the touch, like a BB pellet stuck under my skin. Over the last half year my body had taken on a life of its own, erupting with new hair and smells and fluids. This, I supposed, was what our teachers meant when they talked about “life changes” and “maturation.” It sounded almost beautiful the way they described it, but it wasn’t; it was ugly and unpleasant. They should’ve just said “You become like werewolves,” and we would’ve had a better idea of what to expect from puberty.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“The waterway between our houses marked a boundary as clear as the one between white and black, rich and poor. It was just like at the school yard, only with adults: the Martellos had their circle, my parents had theirs, and the two were never meant to overlap.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“He owned one pair of shiny black shoes that he resoled every two years for twenty years.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“My father wasn’t inclined to talk much about his past, and when he did—when I pressed him for details and he began to reminisce about his youth—he became so dull and long-winded that I soon regretted ever asking him anything.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“For better or worse, I was my father’s son, and I intuited, however unclearly, that my life was inextricably bound up with his. I was who I was because of him. His blood was in my blood, his history was my history. Even my future, the person I might one day become, depended on him, because everything he’d ever seen or done or thought or felt flowed up through him and into me.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“And why, oh why, I wondered, had he named me after himself? What kind of a father would do that to his son? What could he have been thinking? Was it an excess of pride? Or was it, as my sister had once theorized, just the opposite, a deep-seated sense of inferiority that made our father want to double himself?”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“Freshman year, kissing and deep French kissing. Then sophomore year, I’d want to be making out with her. By sixteen we should be having oral sex, and by seventeen or eighteen, full frontal sex. Of course, it could go faster than that, but basically, he said, that was the standard progression. Before I finished high school, I should be having full frontal sex with her.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“She was so pretty, so elegant, it made me lonely just to look at her.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“It’s obvious. Look—see? The black kids are over there hanging out with the black kids. The jocks have their territory. Mary Ida and those other sorry girls are standing over there at the water fountain where you know they’ll always be. We’re sitting here on the bleachers, where boys like us always sit. It’s only the first day of school, but we’re already stuck where we’ll all be for the rest of the year. Who said you had to go there? Nobody. But you did. You went automatically. You had no choice. It’s like, I don’t know, in your blood cells or something. That’s what I mean, a law of nature. The universal law governing the motion of bodies at school.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“Early astronomers said they were rogue planets, or the exhalations of gas from the Earth, or even the smoke of human sins that rose into the sky and burst into flame.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“Drifting off to sleep, I imagined a spark from the comet floating down, down like a mote of stardust, to land inside my father, where, settling in his belly, it rekindled the long-forgotten dreams and ambitions of his youth. I saw his white shirt glowing yellow in the moonlight, flames shooting from his fingertips, like he was a man set on fire.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“I didn’t say who the Sun was; I was careful not to even look in her direction. But I thought that it must’ve been obvious to anyone with eyes to see: there she was in the front row, blazing.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet: A Novel

“The past never leaves you. You carry it around with you for as long as you live, like a pale, stubborn worm lodged there in your gut, keeping you up at night.”
― George Bishop, The Night of the Comet