Tilt Quotes

“We fall back into silence. Something like adrenaline starts beating its slow drum inside me. Maybe you’ll know this feeling one day—there’s nothing a woman hates more than walking by herself, and hearing a strange noise, or feeling the presence of an “other,” that horrible sickness all over my body, ground shifting, women are so unsafe, all of us always pretending to be safe, always avoiding any reminder that our safety is upheld only as long as the person closest to us keeps deciding not to kill us.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“People have done harder things than this. People have been through worse than this. Nobody I know, but still, people.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“Leave those dishes, I should have said. Come play with me in the forest, I should have said. The world will end tomorrow.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt

“People will tell you that everything is clear in hindsight, but really it’s just rewritten.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“Your father lives for a room of strangers to fall in love with him. He lives to be the man he is in a room full of strangers.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“There’s no way to explain to your father that some people make lists of all the ways that babies die and some people don’t.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“You and me, when we die, we’re going to evaporate back into the earth like we were never even here. Bodies made of air, bodies made of dirt.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“But hasn’t it always been the other way around? Haven’t I always been flipping channels and browsing Pinterest while people died and struggled and starved?”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“Never turn your back on the ocean,” she used to say. “Or a Chihuahua.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“If it’s bad news, I don’t want to know. I want to pause here, in this moment, the moment before I know.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“Lately, time seems to move like that, like as soon as I get my hand firmly around a moment, it has turned to dust and there’s a new moment to try and grasp.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“The key to a happy life is wanting what you already have.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“I could have been anything. Gone anywhere.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“For a second, we’re tilted”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“We’re at that stage where we’ve learned to live with our incomprehension of each other. Where it’s easier to nod like, oh yes, I see, than it is to ask for more.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“Calm down. The least calming words ever.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“The problem with so many years spent sitting so close to somebody is that you can tell yourself you’re being seen, but really you’ve disappeared, closed the blinds, nobody’s home.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt

“The happiest people are the ones who want what they already have.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt

“The ocean is a hoarder, you know. Keeping a collection of tchotchkes down there and then spitting them out, one by one, to remind us that it owns all of us.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“Wow,” I say, all sweet. It’s a woman thing: the more scared you get, the nicer you have to be.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“The president is refusing to send help because he hates socialists.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“The man you marry is the man you get, my mother used to say. Meaning: men don’t change. My mother didn’t expect much from men. Not that she was immune to their charms. Men delighted her, fascinated her, the way tourists lean out of the car window to watch a tiger grooming itself in the sun. But nobody’s jumping out of the car for a tiger hug, you know? That was my mother, hands inside the vehicle, hands to herself, men better left sleeping outside in the jungle.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“How do I explain a home to you, Bean? We fill them with dirt and dust and dishes and cat hair. Spend all our time looking on big and small screens at other people’s homes, wishing they were ours. Drive to places like IKEA in hopes that our homes will look more like the homes on our screens.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“He stares into every city like a wishing well, seeing only the possibility of us having a new life: glamorous friends, better jobs. When I bring up the cost of moving, having to find a new dentist, not finding jobs and moving back to Portland with our tails between our legs, he gets annoyed and then quiet, staring out the car window or back at the TV. Still lost in the fantasy of another city, just without me.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“Every couple of minutes, I check my pockets for my phone. I can’t help it. It’s like a phantom limb. Without a phone, I’m like an animal without legs. You have to understand about people my age that we got phones before we had sex, we got phones before we got credit cards, before we started therapy, before we started drinking beer and coffee and two-for-one margaritas at the shitty bar down the street. I learned to drive by following the glowing blue arrow wherever it took me.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“After the show, Heather invited us all to her place for the cast party. I got in my crappy Toyota Camry with the missing door handles and I was driving, thinking that maybe I’d make a move on Jacob, thinking this might be the night everything happens, when I saw your father, standing by the bus stop with his hands in his pockets to keep warm.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“The problem, of course, was that Jacob had eyes only for Heather. Heather, with the turtlenecks and the tortoiseshell glasses and the red lipstick, who was always reading Sylvia Plath. Heather, who schooled your father on how to say scrumptious and who was, in every sense of the word, completely scrumptious.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“The man I wanted to sleep with wasn’t your father. The man I wanted to sleep with was Jacob, a tall, silky man with eyelashes you could hang your coat on. He smelled so much of heat and cloves that I didn’t have to turn my head to know when he walked into the theatre after a smoke break. Jacob was playing the professor who not so subtly suggests to Heather’s character that she doesn’t need a degree to MAKE ART and that she doesn’t need a man to BE HAPPY. Yes, I know.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“A security guard stands in front of the doors, yelling at people to get back. He shoves a woman holding the hands of two boys wearing matching polo shirts, private school uniforms. All the lights in the store are off. The windows shattered. Inside, I can make out the dark hallways of rye bread and non-GMO cereal. At the end of the world, organic food is protected.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt

“Why, how, did my mother start making her birds? I don't know; I never asked. I suppose it was like growing up with a mother who goes to church on Sundays or gets her hair done every two weeks. Why? How? But the child whose mother goes to church on Sundays does not ask those questions, because to that child, it is a perfectly normal thing to do, to go sit on hard benches in a roomful of people discussing the specifics of a fairy tale (yes, I've shown my hand here, I suppose, but sooner or later you and I will have to have this discussion) and then having cookies and coffee afterward and chatting about the weather.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt