The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley Quotes

“Everything breaks if you hit it hard enough.”
― Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“Love isn't about keeping promises. It's about knowing someone better than anyone else. I'm the only one who knows him. I'm the only one who ever will.”
― Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“It was like looking in a mirror. The same flickering hope in Loo, the same desperate need to be loved, was right here in Marshall's mother. And it was in Principal Gunderson, clutching Lily's waist in that old prom photo. And it was Agnes, pressing her feet into the stirrups, listening for her child's cry. And it was in Hawley, mourning with his scraps of paper in the bathroom. Their hearts were all cycling through the same madness—the discovery, the bliss, the loss, the despair—like planets taking turns in orbit around the sun. Each containing their own unique gravity. Their own force of attraction. Drawing near and holding fast to whatever entered their own atmosphere. Even Loo, penning her thousands of names way out at the edge of the universe, felt better knowing others were traveling this same elliptical course, that they would sometimes cross paths, that they would find love and lose love and recover from love and love again—because, if they were all going in circles, and Loo was Pluto, then every 248 years even she would have the chance to be closer to the sun.”
― Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“Changing where you were could change how much you mattered.”
― Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“But the past is like a shadow, always trying to catch up.”
― Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“Something is making this happen, she'd thought. The whole world is alive and moving and I was meant to be here doing exactly this.”
― Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“He kept expecting something to happen, some outside force to sweep in and change everything and take him in some new direction, give him a more normal life.”
― Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“I’m so tired I forget who I am sometimes.”
― Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“He said her name like it was something he'd already left behind. She could feel her heart twisting inside the walls of her chest.”
― Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“But when she turned at the entryway and looked back at him, he left the table and followed, as if she were a magnet, drawing him away from his better judgement.”
― Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“For the first time he had something to lose, and it was funny how that changed things, how it made Hawley imagine himself living past the next day, into the next week, the next year. He’d started wearing his seatbelt. He brushed his teeth. Sometimes he fell so deeply inside his new life that the edges of himself felt like they were coming loose. Then Lily would catch him in one of his old habits—checking and rechecking the locks, or doubling back on streets when he thought they were being followed—and the years he’d spent alone would rise up solidly around him, resonating in the dark like blood pushed out of a pinprick.”
― Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“Their hearts were all cycling through the same madness - the discovery, the bliss, the loss, the despair - like planets taking turns in orbit around the sun. Each containing their own unique gravity. Their own force of attractions. Drawing near and holding fast to whatever entered their own atmosphere ... they would find love and lost love and recover from love and love again.”
― Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“Love isn’t about keeping promises. It’s about knowing someone better than anyone else. I’m the only one who knows him. I’m the only one who ever will.”
― Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“Hawley had met some tough broads over the years, but they were honed that way from rough living. Mabel was something else. Her hardness was built into her very foundation, and she rammed that hardness into others, like an oil tanker barreling through a fleet of rowboats.”
― Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“Hawley reached over and took Lily's hand. He was always taking her hand. He felt better about things, just by holding her fingers.”
― Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“...he tore at her clothing like he was searching for something she had stolen from him.”
― Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“She began to dread the moves but a part of her also itched for them, because it meant that she could stop trying to fit in and simply slip into the place where she belonged: the passenger seat of her father’s truck as they barreled down the highway. They”
― Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“Hello, said Loo.

What's wrong? Hawley asked.

You're not outside.

Not tonight.

But you're *always* outside.

Hawley did not know how to answer. All this time he had been watching her window, it had never occurred to him that she was watching for him, too. He could hear Loo's breath, heavy and expectant, blowing hard into the mouthpiece, and for a moment all he could think of was the sound of the whale's spout--the blast of air and water as the giant rose to the surface, the salted spray that had rained down upon him in Puget Sound and filled him with terror and longing and a sense that he could right the path he was on. He had not realized that he'd been waiting for this sound until he heard it. He knew only that he had been waiting--for something that had never arrived, that had failed him, that had made him rage and murder int he silence it had left. But now here it was again. His daughter, still breathing. And so was he.

I'll come now.

Right now?

Yes, said Hawley. Put your coat on. And get your toothbrush. Your real toothbrush.

Hawley wrapped the phone cord around his arm, tighter and tighter, waiting to hear what she would say. Instead he heard the sound of footsteps. A door open and close. Then a clattering as the phone dropped to the ground. Hawley called Loo's name. He pressed his ear tightly against the receiver, straining to listen. Something dragged across the floor. Shuffling. Thumps. A noise like Velcro being ripped apart. And then she came back to him.

I've got my shoes on, Loo said. I've got the candy, too.”
― Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley