Church of Marvels Quotes

“Why, he wondered, did he have to peddle his difference for their amusement, and yet at the same time temper it, suppress it, make it suitably benign?”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“It had to be the hardest thing, even if he’d never known it himself – to accept that the ones you loved would find their own way home.”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“All great shows, she told me when I was little (and still learning to flex the tiny muscles in my esophagus), depend on the most ordinary objects. We can be a weary, cynical lot—we grow old and see only what suits us, and what is marvelous can often pass us by. A kitchen knife. A bulb of glass. A human body. That something so common should be so surprising—why, we forget it. We take it for granted. We assume that our sight is reliable, that our deeds are straightforward, that our words have one meaning. But life is uncommon and strange; it is full of intricacies and odd, confounding turns. So onstage we remind them just how extraordinary the ordinary can be. This, she said, is the tiger in the grass. It’s the wonder that hides in plain sight, the secret life that flourishes just beyond the screen. For you are not showing them a hoax or a trick, just a new way of seeing what’s already in front of them. This, she told me, is your mark on the world. This is the story that you tell.”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“She had seen it done. Wherever they glittered in the afterlife – flying among the high rafters of heaven, swimming with her mother in an undersea cave – she hoped the tigers had known it, and roared.”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“But this dagger – this was her first. Her favorite. The same one that had sliced off the boy’s toe on the beach and sent it rolling through the sand.”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“Even then, only a child, she knew she had to pretend to be someone else -- for her parents, for their customers, for everyone else in that miserable factory town, dark and ashy with smoke -- even if it made her sad. If she ran fast enough on those raw, dark mornings through the woods, she might see the trees and the morning stars, merrily alive, scurry back to their rightful places. She might hear the animals whisper and sing. And she would gain something special -- a secret knowledge, an awakening. Something else no one else could know. But until then she had to pass unnoticed, waiting to be delivered to another world where she belonged.”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“To be seen but not known was perhaps the loneliest feeling of all. He had to live for that loneliness, he decided—for the private life of his mind, for the possibility of flight.”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“How would it feel to know there were people who’d chosen to live as they felt, not as they appeared, and never looked back? Could she bear their happiness, as shunned as they were? Was she brave enough? Was”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“Her mother’s private feelings, she would realize later (with no small amount of shame), were of no real concern to her. She only cared about what her mother gave to her and what she withheld. If she ever thought beyond that—to what the woman really wanted—it was only because it conflicted with what she wanted for herself.”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“We assume that our sight is reliable, that our deeds are straightforward, that our words have one meaning. But life is uncommon and strange; it is full of intricacies and odd, confounding turns. So onstage we remind them just how extraordinary the ordinary can be. This, she said, is the tiger in the grass. It’s the wonder that hides in plain sight, the secret life that flourishes just beyond the screen. For you are not showing them a hoax or a trick, just a new way of seeing what’s already in front of them.”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“Her mother’s private feelings, she would realize later (with no small amount of shame), were of no real concern to her. She only cared about what her mother gave to her and what she withheld.”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“Undergarments flapped wildly on the fire escapes above, soiled with sweat and blood: private stains, flying high over the city like crests on the flags of a ship.”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“She couldn’t go back home, not ever, not to the people who created her and then reviled what they’d created, who punished her for being the person they had once claimed to love.”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“Moscow brute battle a New York rogue!”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“we remind them just how extraordinary the ordinary can be.”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“ago—I have witnessed the sublime in the mundane, the things you see every day and fail to understand. Now I believe in the tiger in the grass.”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“There were streets named Mulberry and Orchard and Cherry, streets bright and tart, streets with a color and a taste.”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“Here is what I understand now, what my mother used to tell me all those years ago—I have witnessed the sublime in the mundane, the things you see every day and fail to understand. Now I believe in the tiger in the grass.”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“He surrounded himself with people—loud, boorish, smugly glazed—but it only made him feel more invisible somehow. To be seen but not known was perhaps the loneliest feeling of all. He”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“She was fed not by her passion for experience, but by her fury for others. What would she do without their boring conventions? Where”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“She wasn’t classically beautiful—she had an upturned nose and a downturned mouth, which sometimes gave her the look of a startled lapdog—but she was spirited, dirty-mouthed, arch and aggressive in a way that he needed. He felt wanted—for the first time in as long as he could remember—really wanted, and even if it was for the wrong reasons, it was better than being alone with his own mind.”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“He kept fighting. If you didn’t have something to live for, he reasoned, you’d die. Not just to live for, but to live toward. He thought for a little while he’d live for someone else—a”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“Why, he wondered, did he have to peddle his difference for their amusement, and yet at the same time temper it, suppress it, make it suitably benign? Eventually these people drew away, and afterward Sylvan burned with an indignant satisfaction. Being right had become more important to him than being loved. He”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“It awoke something in her, to see someone so kind and giving, so full-hearted, and yet so lost, so wretchedly bent on his own destruction. She had left home, ashamed of herself and the fury she’d caused, but now the prospect of love didn’t seem like such a dangerous thing at all. He”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“Sometimes it astonished him to think how easily he could have died—should have died, any number of times—and yet, improbably, he was still alive. Why? He wanted to tell people, to show them somehow, but he didn’t know how to say it. He didn’t have a family, or a gang, or a corner club to welcome him home. He had no allegiance to anyone except himself. When he was in front of a howling, chanting crowd, in spite of the pandemonium, things became very clear—he had a purpose, a responsibility. He had a name, and it was all that he needed. It belonged to no one else but him. Mrs.”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“Your curiosity, Mrs. Scarlatta had once said, is a dangerous thing. We all need to know our place, or how else would the world go on turning? But”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“Belle could be that way, too. Provoked, she lashed out, and abandoned, she broke. BACKSTAGE”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“His early life, he thought, was like the slow flip of photographs: the images were too sparse and sporadic to make any sense together, but each was so vivid that whenever one flickered to his mind, he was startled by its intensity.”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels

“To be seen but not known was perhaps the loneliest feeling of all. He”
― Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels