Bee Season Quotes

“She has often felt that her outsides were too dull for her insides, that deep within her there was something better than what everyone else could see.”
― Myla Goldberg, Bee Season

“The two bond over their mutual lack of family ties: Saul from his disownment, Miriam from the car accident that orphaned her as a college junior. Both want children. Miriam has inherited her parents' idea of procreative legitimacy, wants to compensate for her only-child-dom. She sees in Saul the househusband who will enable her parental ambitions without disabling her autonomy. In Miriam, Saul sees the means to a book-lined study and a lifestyle conducive to mystical advancement. They are both absolutely certain these things equal love.”
― Myla Goldberg, Bee Season

“Eliza wonders if death is not a sleep you can’t wake up from but life reduced to one inescapable moment.”
― Myla Goldberg, Bee Season: A Compelling Coming-of-Age Novel of Jewish Mysticism and Family Secrets

“Rushing toward her are all the letters of the alphabet. Each one moves in its own way, X cartwheeling over and over, C hopping forward, M and N marching stiff-legged and resolute.”
― Myla Goldberg, Bee Season

“Miriam came to consider Eliza a gosling born into a family of ducks, loved and accepted, but always and forever a goose.”
― Myla Goldberg, Bee Season

“While she eventually adjusts to the faded motivational posters featuring long-dead baby animals and the fifties-era reading books whose soporific effects have intensified with each decade of use she can't get it out of of her head that while she is speeding around in circles waiting to be told when to stop other kids are flying to the moon.”
― Myla Goldberg, Bee Season

“They WERE walking alongside the road, they WERE hit by a car, and now they ARE dead. It doesn't work. Are is present tense. Dead is -- well, dead is past, isn't it? Present tense modifying past; being modifying non-being. Language, in this instance" -- and here Miriam makes a garbled noise in her throat-- "fails.”
― Myla Goldberg, Bee Season

“Miriam will never know what kind of dog attacked her, will imagine a Doberman or a German shepherd with snarling, angry teeth despite the fact she bears neither bite marks nor broken skin. It will never cross her mind that the dog was a beagle and that she was knocked over from a surprise more than force. The children of the house she fled will use the incident to convince their parents to keep the dog, which had been on the verge of being given away for its propensity to shit at the slightest hint of thunder it having been sequestered in the garage that night because of a stormy forecast. The family will never know what manner of burglar their fog deflected, will imagine a scruffy, heavy-set man with scars and a limp groping the family jewelery. It will never cross their minds that their intruder was am upper middle-class wife and mother of two who would have had eyes only for their Chinese teakettle. ”
― Myla Goldberg, Bee Season

“Eliza starts getting a warm feeling in her stomach. It's a cross between a fluttery excited feeling and a sick feeling. She can tell that whatever comes next is going to be big. Part of her wants to freeze time. She would rather enjoy this vague sense of importance than have it defined. She has a feeling that once her father has said whatever it is he is about to say nothing will be the same.”
― Myla Goldberg, Bee Season

“Eliza begins to look at life in alphabetical terms,. School is consonantal in its unchanging status. God, full of possibility, is a vowel. Death: the ultimate consonant.”
― Myla Goldberg, Bee Season

“Quick. Open your eyes. This is what I look like when I believe in you.”
― Myla Goldberg, Bee Season