The Passionate Sister Quotes

“After breakfast they go for a walk, down to Higgs Beach and out to the pier, then along the shore. They’ve ambled like this since Jamie was two, on Connecticut, Cape Cod and Long Island seashores. Ginny holds hands with Lyle, to include him as she reminisces about her boys rowing their dinghies back and forth in front of the Cantipauk house, about eels in the eel grass, gobby-gunk seaweed fights and walks on the mudflats, a pathless world that appeared and vanished twice a day. There the tide ruled their lives in summer, with fiddler crabs and herons in the marsh, strutting gulls on the cobbled shore and halyards clacking on windy nights. On Cape Cod the fogs were so thick that bodies disappeared only thirty feet away. On Long Island the long blue beach stretched all the way to Montauk. The ocean here evokes the oceans there.”
― John Thorndike, The Passionate Sister

“What is it with humans, anyway? Fish never swell with age, and seagulls don’t get pudgy. They flare with timeworn grace and settle on the sand, then strut around the more bizarre species, Homo sapiens. Maybe terns notice when one of their kind grows stiff, when it can no longer scoot across the sand and lift into the air in a tenth of a second. But if there are birds impaired by aging, Ginny has never seen one.”
― John Thorndike, The Passionate Sister

“After a quick dinner she picks up Durrell’s Justine and reads the first chapters again. She’s read the novel several times, and never tires of it. She’s drawn to characters in books, to their dramatic lives and desires. And no wonder. People in novels don’t spend time paying bills or washing dishes, or god forbid pissing or taking a shit. Day after day, no one in a novel ever uses the toilet. They’re too wrapped up with one vital encounter after the next.”
― John Thorndike, The Passionate Sister

“There’s a gift to looking after Miles. Ginny’s despair, her doubts and indecision have all lifted. Maybe they’re hovering and will descend upon her later, but for now only one thing matters, that Miles is dying. The rest of the world runs on. Patty Hearst has been kidnapped and the war continues in Vietnam, but in this quiet house there are no quarrels. The moon and stars pass overhead, waves tumble onto the beach and Miles keeps breathing.”
― John Thorndike, The Passionate Sister

“Floating along on her nostalgia is now her only intoxicant. Again she strokes her breasts and the inside of her thighs, and feels not the least quiver. Carol was right, she was always the passionate sister—but not anymore. Can she really be done with men? Sexually they could be blocks of wood.”
― John Thorndike, The Passionate Sister

“She needs something new, or at least to want something new. The trouble is, she can’t figure out what. She has a goal, which is not to drink. But hoping not to do something is hardly a desire. When she drank she didn’t care about the future. Alcohol and pills did away with all that. They softened her, they lowered her onto a deep cushion.”
― John Thorndike, The Passionate Sister

“She should have filched a few Nembutals before Rob flushed them all down the toilet. Then she wouldn’t have to lie here awake at midnight listening to the hollies rub against her bedroom window, pushed by a night breeze off the bay. She lies under a blanket and another of her quilts, the room smelling faintly of vomit and Glade. At Silver Hill people often talked about these first nights back, and the inevitable craving. She hates that word, craving. She doesn’t crave a drink, she just wants one.”
― John Thorndike, The Passionate Sister