Delicate Monsters Quotes

“They had it all wrong, of course. Bravery wasn't required to conquer fear. Indifference was.”
― Stephanie Kuehn, Delicate Monsters

“But maybe he'd always known. Maybe the cool winds of fate and the flag-snap flutter of destiny had always been there, tickling his spine, whispering in his ear it's gonna catch up with you boy one of these days the truth'll come back so you'd better go go go, until finally, Emerson couldn't help but listen. There was only so much ruin the mind could rationalize. There was only so much badness that could be suppressed for so long. His guilt, on its own, was utterly meaningless - just a showy type of magic that changed nothing because changing nothing was the endgame all along. Words like absolution and forgiveness and redemption would never apply to someone like him. Those terms were just abstractions. Names for what other people called the moments between darkness.”
― Stephanie Kuehn, Delicate Monsters

“Hurting people wasn't all that different, though. That was also a form of taking and she did it all the time. Sometimes she wished she didn't. Sometimes the things she took were unforgivable and she'd give anything to have better control over herself. Then again, sometimes Sadie was bored. And oftentimes, that was more than enough.”
― Stephanie Kuehn, Delicate Monsters

“Was it possible to fall so far from greatness? Was this, then, his destiny?”
― Stephanie Kuehn, Delicate Monsters

“And wasn't that him giving her permission to hurt him? It felt as if he were handing over the reins of his own suicidal impulses. That was how Sadie understood it. Of course, it was how she wanted to understand it, because to her, toying with him and offering him hope every now and then that she might actually find value in him as a human being, before pulling it all out from under him, was pure pleasure. It was everything and more. So there'd been no reason why she'd done what she'd done. There'd just been no reason not to.”
― Stephanie Kuehn, Delicate Monsters

“The most dangerous lie in America isn't a political one," he'd told her, as he stood by the plate glass window, gazing down at the frigid Helsinki skyline. "It's the lie that who we are is some fixed self-determined truth. That there's some absolute us-ness in our character that's unchangeable and real, and that we have an obligation to be true to this us-ness, no matter the cost. As if who we are could exist in the absence of other people. We're no more eternal than a single star, Sadie. Remember that. We shine. We burn out. But together, we can light the sky.”
― Stephanie Kuehn, Delicate Monsters

“Maybe there were times when suicide made sense. When the immoral choice is moral. Emerson could believe that. But his father was no Walter White. He hadn't been terminally ill or struggling with addiction or living a dual life where he'd accrued huge gambling debts that he couldn't pay off. There'd been no sacrifice in his actions. Only weakness. And his pain, however deep it had been, hadn't disappeared with his death. He'd simply passed it on to those who'd loved him. That's what really got to Emerson. The selfishness of it all.”
― Stephanie Kuehn, Delicate Monsters

“When she felt more comfortable and no one was looking, Sadie turned away from the group. She sidled a little ways down the hillside, black sheep leaving the flock, before edging out of sight of the ropes course, the towering redwood trees, and the other girls from the wilderness camp. They were teenagers like her, the girls, all supposedly "troubled". Only unlike Sadie, they were wide-eyed and tragic, fragile, herdlike things, brimming with stories of Painful Childhoods about who'd touched them where or hit them or abandoned them and a million other sad sap exercise for why they did the Things They Did. Sadie couldn't be bothered to take it all in. Misery repulsed her. Self pity even more. She especially couldn't understand the counsellors and therapists who chose to work here. It made Sadie shudder to think about. If there was a special circle in hell for girls like her, and she suspected there might be, there was no doubt her eternity would be spent having to listen to other people's problems'.”
― Stephanie Kuehn, Delicate Monsters

“Somewhere. somehow, in the near future, Miles knew, some of them would be winners, some losers, and others, like himself, would be asked to fall on their swords.”
― Stephanie Kuehn, Delicate Monsters

“Race wasn’t even something he thought about these days, because that’s what you were supposed to do. Pretend it didn’t matter. Still,”
― Stephanie Kuehn, Delicate Monsters

“What she had, and what Miles would because of her, why that was the point of it all. Wasn't that a brilliant thing? She'd had her shine. And now, somewhere, somehow, for a heart she'd never know, to light a sky she'd never see, someone else was preparing for theirs.”
― Stephanie Kuehn, Delicate Monsters

“That's the thing about after, Sadie. It's still happening, and there's no one answer to what you want to know. I'm living after. Every second. Every minute. Every day. But I'm living, and there's that. So here are a few of my immediate afters. Moments I'm not proud of: After... I wanted to die. I wanted to kill myself. I wanted to kill you. Clearly, I didn't do any of those things, although I can see how for someone else, it would be easy to get stuck in one of those afters and not let go. But I moved on, because that's who I am. I realize this now, and I'm starting to be okay with it. For one, I'm a pacifist. I'm also afraid of death. But more than anything, what keeps me here on this earth and lets me live with my failures is the knowledge that I am a lamb among wolves. I am not you.”
― Stephanie Kuehn, Delicate Monsters

“Even stranger, though, was how, at this very moment, this car with its echoes of death and decisions and life courses forever altered was the one place where Emerson had never felt so vividly alive.”
― Stephanie Kuehn, Delicate Monsters