The Strays Quotes

“I was learning the habit of attention, of noticing the world in all its ravishing detail and complexity. The habit of being amazed. They told stories, looking at objects and people until they shook them clean of the dust of everyday and made them myth.”
― Emily Bitto, The Strays

“There is no intimacy as great as that between young girls. Even between lovers, who cross boundaries we are accustomed to thinking of as at the furthest territories of closeness, there is a constant awareness of separateness, the wonder at the fact that the loved one is distinct, whole, with a past and a mind housed behind the eyes we gaze into that exist, inviolate, without us. It is the lack of such wonder that reveals the depth of intimacy in that first chaste trial marriage between girls.”
― Emily Bitto, The Strays

“WHEN WAS IT THAT I BECAME A VOYEUR in their midst? I was the perfect witness, an unsuspected anthropologist disguised within the body of a young girl, surrounded by other young girls who were part of the family. Yet I was a cuckoo in the nest, an imposter who listened and observed, hoarding and collecting information.”
― Emily Bitto, The Strays

“I didn't know what he meant, but tried to remember his words, to store them up until I grew into them, like the clothes of an older child packed away for a younger.”
― Emily Bitto, The Strays

“round”
― Emily Bitto, The Strays

“With Eva, I had given no though to the world of adulthood that awaited us. But she had crossed some secret threshold while I was facing the other way, absorbed still by the childish fantasies she had cultivated for us: our talk of traveling the world together; of having a salon in Paris or on the Riviera, where all the famous writers and artists were; of becoming artists ourselves, marrying exotic European strangers and always living close to one another; of how, when our husbands died, we would move together into a great crumbling mansion and be visited by amazing people from around the world. Now, I saw so clearly that all of that had been a silly game. She had a lover, presumably, while I did not even truly know what this vague and glamorous term entailed. She had become a woman, with no thought to warn me that I should be packing away my own childhood, dismantling it piece by piece like a rotten tree house, and preparing myself for the new world.”
― Emily Bitto, The Strays

“In a house, as in a garden, there is a point when over-mingling can occur. At first, when the new plants are dug in, there is too much space between them. They seem artificial, temporary. Then, as they grow, the bed finds a point of balance, the taller trees occupying the upper layers, the sprawling shrubs - the hydrangeas, buddleia, pittosporum - filling out the middle, and the smaller bulbs and ground covers punctuating the under-spaces. Then, without warning, equilibrium is lost. A rampant jasmine covers an adolescent tree; a hydrangea thrives, forcing out a lilly pilly that struggles for light beneath a spreading magnolia. The spaces are subsumed. In the house, there was a period when everyone thrived. Even Heloise had been noticed by Jerome, who was sitting down with her on most days and doing sums and geography, and reading poetry. 'She has real talent,' he said to Helena, over the kitchen bench. She raised an eyebrow ambiguously but didn't comment. Then, slowly, the balance began to slip.”
― Emily Bitto, The Strays

“It is strange which events leave those deep scars we carry with us over a lifetime. When Heloise talked about that night, even years later, it was with a bitter seriousness, a complete inability to see the events other than as they occurred to her as a seven-year-old. It became a foundation myth, a lasting symbol of the troubled nature of Heloise's childhood, the real sufferings she endured, but also the way she experienced these sufferings, reliving them over and over until they wore away their own caged-animal paths within her.”
― Emily Bitto, The Strays

“What drew Eva and me together was our shared sense of imagination. Hers was formed from rich materials, mine from poor; hers developed over endless hours in the exotic garden kingdom she inhabited with her sisters, mine over hours alone. But the end result was the same, and each recognized it in the other.”
― Emily Bitto, The Strays

“Eva's mother believed in past life connections, that two souls can be twinned over and over, playing out different roles so that in one life they may be mother and daughter, in another husband and wife, in a third dear friends. I only know that throughout my life I have felt an instinctive attraction to particular people, male and female, romantic and platonic; attraction inexplicable at the time but for a certain mutual recognition. It was this way with Eva, although we were only eight years old.”
― Emily Bitto, The Strays

“I am angry with myself. I failed to speak from that compartment in myself, as that persona who represents motherhood the one who knows my daughter will always in some way look down on me; will not know my dark places and my desires, my ambivalences, even toward her; will think herself wiser, braver, more modern, her inner life more intriguing, her challenges more compelling I have cherished the self who knows this and accepts it. It is without vanity, able to resist the urge to be understood.”
― Emily Bitto, The Strays

“I feel something beginning to shift in me, and I am not sure I want it to; it is a reevaluation, a tiny release of the grip I have held on anger and am struggling to maintain against the frail specters I saw tonight.”
― Emily Bitto, The Strays

“I suppose we both had our secrets, though I felt betrayed when I found out later what she had kept from me. I did not see that at some point, unnoticed, we had begun to retreat from the pristine intimacy of our childhood, that we had been walking backward as we faced each other, objects concealed behind us. In my hand I held a notebook in which I recorded, scrutinized, the people Eva considered her family. Perhaps mine was the greater betrayal.”
― Emily Bitto, The Strays

“Eva didn't even glance at the painting in her search for Heloise, but I could not take my eyes from it. I knew it was of some ghastly private act between men and women that I did not understand. It made me feel the way I felt when I overheard a snippet of conversation between adults alluding to something I wasn't supposed to know about: something bodily, about women's "time of the month," which I knew had to do with the blood stains on the pinkish-beige underpants my mother sometimes left soaking in the laundry trough; about the betrayals of our next-door neighbor's husband that were frequently and tearfully discussed in our kitchen; or about the behavior of one of the boys in my class, who had been caught bribing girls with lollies to pull their pants down.”
― Emily Bitto, The Strays

“That year, everything was new. New school, new house, overheard talk of my father's new job. I was too young to understand the Depression, but it was clear that this newness was not of the good kind, that our house was smaller than the one we had left behind. It was not the luster of a new penny; it was a sharp, garish newness. But Eva was my penny. She had the soft light of recognition. She was warmed, as if by my own hand. I had been asking for a sister, but she was better. I wanted to be with her always and would have discarded my own parents, heartlessly, as only the securely cared-for can.”
― Emily Bitto, The Strays