The Number of Missing Quotes

“Let's take a walk. You can show me some of your memories and I'll show you some of mine.”
― Adam Berlin, The Number of Missing

“We play phone tag, back and forth, the kind of tag where it's clear we're avoiding each other, where no one wants to be touched, tagged, you're it”
― Adam Berlin, The Number of Missing

“And I'd noticed her eyes, the lightest blue, and alive, moving here and there and then staring straight on. And now there's darkness under her eyes like she hasn't slept well for too many days, almost like someone punched her just hard enough to leave a little black, a quarter-moon smudge under each eye.”
― Adam Berlin, The Number of Missing

“She can look at you and make you feel like you’re the only one in the world. Even if it’s not true, she can make you feel that way. And with her child, it would be true. She would look at her child for as long as her child needed.”
― Adam Berlin, The Number of Missing

“Her grief has not so much changed her as stripped her down, stripped her body and her face.”
― Adam Berlin, The Number of Missing

“She takes another sip of her drink. She looks around the bar. I look at the fine muscles in her neck, at the two points of her clavicle. Her grief has not so much changed her as stripped her down, stripped her body and her face. Maybe she should do what I do. She could stand next to me and the students could draw our lines. I order another bourbon, count the count.”
― Adam Berlin, The Number of Missing

“The digging continues ... Ground Zero it looks more and more like a construction site. Too much of the horror is gone. No fire. No smoke ... What was war becomes peace, becomes peaceful. But in the coil of my testicles there's an angry residue and in places I can't even name, places inside my throat and behind my chest, I'm sad, and sometimes worse than sad, less than sad, a cavity of empty.”
― Adam Berlin, The Number of Missing

“He wanted to break me, the me I'd made, the me I'd needed to make, my need, mine, my whole life since I could remember. I didn't want to hear him that night. When I was ready to change I'd change. When life opens up before you, when you don't really know death ... it's easy to promise yourself change. Keeping the lines hard, the parts of me separate, was what I knew, how I lived.”
― Adam Berlin, The Number of Missing

“I turn the water all the way hot, turn my back to the water, and I take it. I close my eyes and I'm on the hundredth floor with the jet-fuel fire at my back and the drop below. I take it and take it until I can't take it, until the heat takes over everything, and I jump, plummeting to the street
I'm out of the shower.
I turn my back to the mirror and look at the too-red skin behind my shoulder blades. The wind blows north and the smoke is here. Then the wind shifts and you can't smell a thing. Then the wind shifts again. Now you smell it, now you don't.”
― Adam Berlin, The Number of Missing