Spectacular Things Quotes

“She is coming to understand that love and loss live on the same coin. It’s never heads or tails but joy and agony, grief and delight, spinning in the air, waiting on time and luck to determine not when this chapter ends but how the next one begins.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“As Mia watches the girl and dog lie nose to nose, the capacity to love strikes her as cruelly beautiful. At birth, each person unwittingly signs a contract to say goodbye to everyone they're about to meet. Life is merciless in that way, in its promise to end.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“A steady, ordinary life can be extraordinary so long as it’s centered around family and community and filled with love.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“Because fighting about the past is easier than considering the future.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“What good fortune to share our fortune.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“What good fortune to be spared one’s fortune.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“What Mia has gained in the loss of her mother is perspective. She understands she is on Earth for such an indefinite amount of time and that the only guarantee is that life is short and unreliable and that it is easy to get waylaid in daily stress that doesn’t ultimately matter. Her gift”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“They are giddy with disbelief and the infinite possibilities that ride shotgun to hope.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“Her face is the same irresistible invitation as a turned-down bed, a glass-surfaced lake - you can't help but fall into it.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“The only way to use your head is to keep your eyes wide open.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“She wants to be in the past with her mom but also in the future with her family of three, and she wishes she didn't have to choose. Instead life demands a constant compromise. What was that thing she'd read somewhere, before she was pregnant, when she still had a memory? A good compromise is when everyone leaves dissatisfied.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“You finally need me,' Cricket says, fresh tears falling.
'I’ve always needed you.'
'Not until you needed a kidney.' Cricket tries and fails at a smile.
'No,' Mia interrupts, slow and deliberate. 'I needed you—and I still need you—because you’re my sister.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“The books say you don’t move on from grief,” Mia murmurs in Cricket’s ear. This only makes her sister cry harder. “They say that, to accommodate all the love and loss and loneliness, your heart has to grow bigger.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“the capacity to love strikes her as cruelly beautiful. At birth”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“She is coming to understand that love and loss live on the same coin. It’s never heads or tails but joy and agony”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“Winter in Maine is the perfect time to dream about Los Angeles sun—”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“They will both recall this moment in slow motion, the severing of their lives into before & after, mothered and orphaned.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“She drinks with the abandon of someone who has long denied her own thirst.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“It is easy to be gracious from the number-one spot,”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“the nursery is bursting with potential energy, like a classroom before the first day of school, right before life rips through it.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“And there in the pool, Cricket reminds herself, she has been treading water, which isn’t to say she’s been doing nothing. Because treading water means consistent, whole-body work, and actively deciding not to drown, and staying calm about not drowning, and continuing to push in one place even as fatigue settles in and threatens to pull her under or push her out.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“She’s long since stopped wondering why she cries when she does because it’s ultimately always the same reason—she misses her mom. It’s impossible to hold all the sorrow when it blindsides her like it did just now, this tremendous ache of not getting to talk to the one person she really, desperately needs to.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“Amid the meows and hisses, the Labrador barks and the hound dog bays that mark the passage of hours and weeks, Mia feels the straight, rigid arrow of her ambition curl in on itself like a sleeping cat. Rather than strive to become as extraordinary as her mom could have been, Mia feels a growing desire to be entirely ordinary. The predictability feels safe, and the safety feels good.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“Cricket shouts a third time, and Mia turns toward her sister, grief tattooed across her face like winter’s shadow. She is the messenger of death. She is the ruiner of lives. She is familiar but unrecognizable, and so Cricket searches the stands, looking to their missing piece for an explanation, eyes seeking to disprove what her body already knows.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“His hand is rough but his smile is warm. He reminds her of the stray cat who sometimes sleeps under their porch—Q seems nice enough, but it’s hard to know how he’ll behave if they bring him inside.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“In the surrounding vehicles, tourists roll down their windows and hold up their phones to document the high drama of a drawbridge: how the road rises into a wave of asphalt that eclipses the sun.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“Her worth begins and ends with the ball at her feet, so Cricket hangs up and gets dressed for afternoon practice.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“She is coming to understand that love and loss live on the same coin.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things

“good thing she’s going to college, because she clearly needs to get smarter.”
― Beck Dorey-Stein, Spectacular Things