Boys in the Trees Quotes

“Besides, as Mark Twain once said, “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees

“There’s always that peculiar thing that rescues you, the thing that’s so hard to name. If I were to locate and then identify all the hellish things we all have to go through in life in order to uncover one minute of happiness, it would take up a lot of space.”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees

“We were enough with ourselves and our enormous little lives.”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees

“preprandial”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees

“As James came toward me, the space between us got smaller and smaller, and our perpendicular lines, with the surge of a waterfall, became parallel. Our life together would go on in just this way for quite some time.”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees

“I’d study the people around me for clues. Clues to figure out whom to emulate, how to dress, how to speak, how to act, how to dance. I’d grown up feeling unworthy and underloved. I wanted nothing more than to feel secure in myself—to feel that I was really good at something.”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees

“The Beast was the feeling that I was never good enough or loved enough, the persistent fear that I would forever end up trivial second best to my beautiful sisters, Lucy and Joey. The Beast was self-consciousness, fear and loneliness inside a house run by a mother and a father who only occasionally took their roles as parents seriously. Then and forever, the Beast was my envious feelings about everything I worried about not being. The Beast was and is whatever feels insurmountable in the moment. Its key words are “enough,” “you should,” “why can’t you?” with me falling short and ashamed and exposed every single time. I’m sure everybody has their version of their own Beast, but this is my book.”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees

“Lack of attention from Daddy made me think less of me and not less of him.”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees

“I developed the unprovable theory that the best things in life begin in the rain.”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees

“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees

“and declining all efforts at closeness or intimacy. “James just doesn’t seem to want me,” I wrote in my diary. “Bastard, I hate him. Why do I love him so? Why don’t I love a Giver? I suppose I need enough elusiveness to keep me feeling as unworthy as I believe myself to be. Perhaps James has”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees

“As if I were a calf at auction, Henry asked me to stand in profile. That night I was wearing knit pants, and my swelling outline must have been dramatic, but unable to see myself as others did, and curious but not offended by Henry’s request, I turned forty-five degrees to the left. Across the room, the writer made an alarmed-sounding noise. Henry announced, to no one in particular, “You see?” The”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees

“At almost three, I was the baby girl, a waif, blond sprouting in competing directions from my scalp. My nose was wider at the bridge than both my sisters’, a source of embarrassment for my father, who, I would later find out, favored the Nordic look in the women he loved. My nose wasn’t the only way I disappointed him. After two daughters, he’d been counting on a son, a male successor to be named Carl. When I was born, he and Mommy simply added a y to the word, like an accusing chromosome: Carly. My”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees

“Alphonso”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees

“insouciance.”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees

“The Vineyard is famously lovely, compared often to sections of Scotland and Ireland. Plots of land are casually separated by stone walls, like a sentence that doesn’t take the turn you think it will take, but takes another way around. Sagging barns on ponds look over fields and marshland. The island gets a bit flatter on its south side, as the interior ponds and streams advance to the ocean. Turn around and then a path or an inlet leads you to a dock and a pint-size rowboat with a single oar. Scruffy fishing vessels nearly disappear under the large coils of rope used for hauling pails and other traps that bring lobsters in from the deep.”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees

“hot, I was shivering. Billy, though,”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees

“who, from what I could tell, was a few years younger than I. He was sitting on the steps of the porch next to Davy Gude, another Vineyard boy, whose parents”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees