This Darkness Mine Quotes

“All imperfections glare in the spotlight.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“All the stupid people I know are happy.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“Thank you,' Mom says, dropping one of my bags to the floor with a huff. There's a fine sheen of sweat on her upper lip. It must be exhausting carrying around all of my issues.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“This is me, this is who I am. This is Sasha Stone, who would have graduated as valedictorian and gone to Oberlin, who would have been on a dark stage in a few years, wearing black, unable to see the audience because of stage lights but feeling them there, their eyes on her though an entire orchestra was onstage. Sasha Stone always garnered the attention. Sasha Stone stood out in a sea of stars. But somehow I am here, not on a darkened stage but in a badly lit room with flickering fluorescents that hum to match the mechanical hearts of my audience members. I am here, with a harsh line down the middle of my face to match the one on my chest, a line that—should I ever make any stage—could never be covered by makeup. The light would seek it out. Illuminate it. All imperfections glare in the spotlight.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“You’re a terrible person, Sasha Stone,” she says, eyes closing down into tiny slits. “There’s an ugliness inside of you that can’t be dug out, not with the knife you used, not with talk therapy, not with anything I know of. You’re so far gone you won’t even acknowledge it, claiming it all comes from someone else, somewhere else, never inside of you. “You take the people who care about you most and manipulate them. You get your friends to lie for you, cut yourself up, and blame it on a boy who will probably never recover from seeing that, send your mother down an unstable path and your father trying to stop her so that he won’t get in your way. You got me fired and my license is up for review—do you understand what that means? I worked my whole life to help others and now I’m not going to be able to, because of you.” She’s close to me now, the hot breath of another drive-through meal wafting in my face. I sit up, all my cords coming with me, and lean toward her so that we’re almost nose to nose. “And how does that make you feel?” I ask.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“Karen thinks you’re crazy.”
A gust of wind hits my windows, a total whiteout of snow coming with it.
“That sounds like an opinion, not a fact.”
And that’s exactly what it is, the opinion of an RN against the complete psychological evaluation I lied my way through to even get onto the donor wait list. So I’ll hedge my bets waiting to see what happens first—an official diagnosis or the death of someone with an O neg heart. Someone who could be out there driving right now, in this snowstorm. Or shitstorm. Or perfect storm. In my lap, I cross my fingers.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“Open your eyes, Sasha,” she says. I don’t want to. I don’t want to, but she’s asking me to so it must be what I’m supposed to do. It must be the right thing, so I do it. I do it and I see. Shanna is here too, in the bathroom. She looks like death in this lighting, the hollow at the base of her throat deep like a gouge. Her eyebrows are even thinning, tiny hairs gone entirely where the scar passes through her face, a red, heavy scar with pinprick dots still healing on each side of it where she’s been sewn together again like a quilt. My scar. My face. “Oh my God,” I say, hand reaching up to brush against cheekbones close to the surface of my skin. “It’s . . . that’s me.” “Yes,” Amanda says, her eyes holding mine in the mirror, our reflections honest and true with each other. “It’s always been you.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“Amanda leans forward in her chair, which should be dramatic but she loses her balance when it rolls a little.
“Sasha, I’ve spoken to quite a few doctors on this topic and all of them say that there’s no way to effectively determine what causes a miscarriage that early in pregnancy. Your mother didn’t cause the miscarriage, and neither did you. You don’t owe her anything.”
“Well, she gave birth to me, so . . .”
“I mean Shanna,” Amanda says.
I lean toward her as well, because I think she would like that. “I know,” I say.
What I don’t say is that I’m starting to think Shanna owes me.
Big-time.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“I have Shanna’s self inside of me, wrapped up in her heart. If I look at an inversion of myself, like the mirror box, I guess . . . I guess I’d see her.”
It feels right, like I’ve done it. Unwound another problem put in front of me and come up with the answer. I open my eyes, and Amanda stares back at me so long I have to resist the urge to tell her that her glasses are crooked.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“Do you know the difference between the mind and the brain?” I ask.
Amanda blinks quickly a couple of times, and I can’t tell if she’s surprised that I know to ask in the first place or insulted that I am putting the question to someone with a degree. An associate’s degree, anyway.
“Yes, I know the difference,” she says. “Do you?”
“Your brain is an organ. Your mind is your consciousness, your thoughts, the definition of who you are.” I close my eyes, hoping that the words are right, the logic inside of me finding a channel out that others will comprehend. “The brain is a physical thing, but a mind is separate and indistinct. Like a soul. An identity.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“Medicine can’t explain why a phantom limb itches in the night, fingers scratching for skin that isn’t there. They don’t know how to silence the burn in a foot that doesn’t exist, the tingle in a hand rotting elsewhere. There is no answer for how a muscle not attached to the body can cramp, causing familiar pain in a limb long estranged from its owner. They’ve tried. Severed nerve endings have been cauterized, stumps shortened, entire areas of the brain deadened to stop signals from nowhere. It doesn’t work. Instead of relief, the afflicted receive fresh pain to compound the suffering, scar tissue piled over trauma. I don’t know how my heart left me, only that it did”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“It’s always been a favorite of mine, and though it’s written for children, there’s a true sadness in this song, followed by what feels like a paroxysm of rage at the end, a denial of what will happen, or perhaps already has. This song is about death, and while I’ve always known that, I never played it like I understood. Until now.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“The clarinet is waiting for me by the chair in the common room, a constant that has held for me in even the worst of times. Now, in the great tempest of my life, I am the one that abandoned it. I suspect that’s how it began, me denying music my talent and instead giving that time over to Isaac, forsaking my mind for my body, not knowing that the last did not belong entirely to me. And so Shanna erupted, tearing into my life as she destroyed it.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“O is the universal donor, but O neg can only receive from other O negs, which make up about 7 percent of the world’s population. So they’d treat me like a queen and pump me dry. Getting that attention seemed cool then. Now it’s a death sentence.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“And how does the LVAD make you feel?” I consider telling her about the butterfly in my chest that needs electricity to work, how it reminds me of the beetle with a pin through its living body, something I did, the big, bleeding red A on that science project. How that wasn’t terribly fulfilling because it was just another in a long line, before and after, my grades a long vowel-filled exhalation of superiority. But she’s waiting with her pen and paper, ready to put it all down permanently. And these are dark things that need to stay inside. So I lie. “Alive,” I say”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“Her hair is up in a messy bun that some girls can pull off. She is not one of those girls.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“Dad said something, and I should answer him. The thing about the bugs and the magnifying glass. I remember that toy, remember peering down at little body parts for hours, trying to figure out how they worked.
“So I can manipulate them,” I say, not realizing my thoughts are flowing outward now. “If I know how they work, I can make them do what I want.”
Dad sighs, rests his forehead against the window.
“You graduated to people though, didn’t you?” he asks. “When you found out about . . .” He doesn’t finish, doesn’t say her name, whoever the woman is that he’s cheating on mom with. “When you found out you didn’t get mad, didn’t run to tell your mom. You held on to it, used it against me.
“I don’t know how many surgeries it would take to make you a nice person,” he says, his voice a whisper that comes back from the glass, as cold as the surface they just hit. “How many hours of therapy. They can give you a new heart, but they can’t fix something that isn’t in there. What’s missing from you, Sasha?”
My tongue is a lead weight, so I can’t ask him if there were cameras in the surgery, or if someone in there ran their mouth. Everything I was afraid of has come to pass. They opened me up and found nothing inside.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“Jesus.” Dad puts his head in his hands, and is so still that I wonder if he got too upset and the pacemaker blew. “How did you get to be so cold, Sasha?” he asks. “How are you just now figuring it out?” I shoot back. “I knew,” he says quietly. “Your mom, she doesn’t want to see it, but I’ve always known. For your fourth birthday we took you to the zoo, and in the gift shop all the other kids were grabbing stuffed animals, hugging them, naming them right there on the spot. You picked out a set of dead bugs, suspended in glass cubes. It came with a magnifying class so you could study them.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“He shakes his head. “I’d like to say that you’ll understand someday, Sasha. But I don’t know if you will.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“Dad is at the window, watching the sunrise. His eyes flick over to me when I move, and we stare at each other for a second. “How are you feeling?” “Like a machine,” I answer. “How are you feeling?” “Like a human, but with a pacemaker,” he says. I’m the first to look away.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“I don’t tell her that we’re both still sulking a bit from the use of the word psychotic.
Because if that’s accurate then I’m crazy and she doesn’t exist.
Unacceptable.
For both of us.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“The weight on my chest shifts with the exhale and I feel something new, the flutter of a small butterfly trapped inside my chest, a piece of my science project resurrected and left behind when they sewed me up. It’s in there with Shanna, wanting out.
My hands go to my chest to help it, to tear open myself and make amends for the beetle. But they are weak things, my fingers, and all they can do is feel the stitches, follow them down. Down to the cord that exits my body, right below where the butterfly is trapped.
And it’s not a butterfly after all, but the new pieces of my heart, which was never mine in the first place. It pumps away inside me, whirring and working, making noises and pushing my blood, wrapped around Shanna in this life-giving embrace that she must endure to keep us going.
I don’t know what is her and what is me, what is us and what is machine. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“Maybe there’s a boy,” she says. “Maybe I met him at a camp for kids like me, the kind where you don’t go for long hikes or do trust falls, because we were all fragile things. Maybe we write each other letters instead of texting, so that we’ve each got something that the other actually touched, in case it’s the last one that’ll come. Maybe he got his heart, and it’s a fine, strong one. Maybe he’s waiting on me so that we can meet again someday, the same people we were before, but now with more time ahead of us than what’s behind. Maybe that’s why I haven’t decided to die just yet. Maybe that’s my love story.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“Hey,” I say, as I step into the circle of light he’s parked in.
“Hey,” he says back, his eyes roaming over my face.
I still haven’t looked in the mirror, because if I did I know I would have told him not to come. The nurses keep telling me it’s improving, but I’m nowhere near what I was the last time he saw me. I can part my hair so that the half that’s still growing in isn’t as obvious, but the stitches across my forehead can’t be hidden. So I don’t even try, instead meeting his eyes boldly.
“Shit, lady,” he says, his hands going to my face. He runs his thumb over the stitches softly, and I lean into his touch. “You look badass.”
“Badass, huh?” I say, a tear slipping down one cheek. He wipes it away without comment.
“Thought it’d be worse, after everything I heard.”
“And you still came?” I ask, wondering what he could have imagined that looked worse than I do now, yet still brought him here in the dark of night.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“It’s hers. It’s the fault of a girl who doesn’t know how to live what little bit of a life she’s been given, a small space tucked into the dark cavity of my chest. It’s the fault of a girl who doesn’t know how to be a real person, the fault of a girl who maybe already knew that she only had so much time left.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“I remember. I also remember that you called me a bitch.” (...)
“I’m sorry about that,” she finally says. “But you know what? You kind of are a bitch, dude. But I don’t care, because you’re also smart and funny, and kind of a musical genius. So whatever. If you’re a little bit of a bitch too, then fine, I’ll take you that way. Because honestly the person you’re the biggest bitch to is yourself, Sasha Stone. “You’ve always pushed yourself to your limits and never cut yourself any slack. I think you demand perfection out of yourself and everyone around you, and sometimes we fail you, and sometimes you fail yourself. And I think you hate that more than anything.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“Hey,” she says. “What’s the difference between this place and a nursing home?”
“I don’t know.”
“Everybody in a nursing home is waiting to die. We’re all waiting to live.”
One of the girls playing chess turns in her wheelchair. “Layla, how many times do I have to tell you that joke isn’t funny?”
“How many times have I got to tell you it isn’t a joke?” Layla shoots back, and the chess player huffs, returning to her game even though it looks like her opponent might have hit the painkillers a little hard and blacked out early.
“What about, everybody here is waiting for someone else to die?” I suggest.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“You said yourself that I seemed happy,” I tell her. “But why are you?” It’s a good question. How can I be happy when the clasp on my clarinet case actually creaks from lack of use? How can I be happy when I flubbed a basic scale this week in band, my fingers correcting automatically, but not before Charity’s eyes made a quick dash in my direction, noting the mistake? How can I be happy when my boyfriend and my lover are two different people? “Because I’m two different people,” I say, answering myself aloud, feeling the jigsaw of my new life click together. I’m a puzzle, definitely. But not the kind that lies flat on the table waiting for someone to piece it together. My broken bits have flurried through the air of their own volition, creating in three dimensions. And I don’t need finishing.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“You always do what good people are supposed to do,” he goes on. “But I don’t think you always want to. There’s a little bit of bad in you, Sasha Stone. And I think it needs to get out more.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine

“She’s not here,” Jane announces.
My hand goes back to my pocket to reassure myself that the ultrasound is still there, the only thing in the world that says I have—or had—a sister.
A sister who wasn’t born and never died.”
― Mindy McGinnis, This Darkness Mine