White Fur Quotes

“She likes the mystery of that changeover, those fifteen minutes of sundown when the streets and trees and people and parked cars are delicate and immediate, every sound and smell and movement amplified by the lowest light or the lightest darkness. Even a city that’s broken and dirty can, in that time, be divine and intimate.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“I’ll die for your sins if you live for mine.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“It's like he never wanted anything, but only thought and fretted about what he should want, what other people wanted him to want.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“So much of life is about standing on the curb, willing to see what rolls up.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“She thinks in wild gardens, and his thoughts are espaliered into an introduction with a thesis, then supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion. She”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“She caught him in his schoolboy mode, polite and dutiful, mailing letters to his grandparents and step-siblings, notes full of nothing written in perfect script. Yet he feels like she caught him so unaware and alone that she saw the other side, the wolf crawling through wreckage, through broken walls, cracked Venetian mirrors, dust, blood, a turned-over rocking horse - the child who doesn't know it's own name.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“He remembers noticing his dad's shadow was shorter than the others, and he had a visceral sense his father was weaker than the rest, and that he was more dangerous as a weak person with a lot of power than a powerful person with a lot of power.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“As filthy as any night was, a New York City morning is always clean. The eyes get washed.
Flowers in white deli buckets are replenished. The population bathes, in marble mausoleums of Upper East Side showers, or in Greenwich Village tubs, or in the sink of a Chinatown one-bedroom crammed with fifteen people. Some bar opens and the first song on the jukebox is Johnny Thunders, while bums pick up cigarette butts to see what’s left to smoke. The smell of espresso and hot croissants. The weather vane squeaks in the sun. Pigeons are reborn out of the mouths of blue windows.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“There's a way to resolve chaos and that's to finish what was started, and every organism knows this emergency plan without being told.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“The dreaminess of the night shift is constant, and objects float - keys and coffee cups and Chinese containers and tissues. Time seems free to do what it wants.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“She buys a coffee with a couple quarters and sits in the park. She fools everyone, and always has, letting her mouth fall open (untended, obviously dumb), and never blinking her eyes, which are mean, simple marbles, one-dimensional and lightless. Her shoulders hunch, the long masculine hands uncertain where to rest or hang. But she's tracking, computing, and either discarding or accepting factors other people barely notice. Her costume - the gray jeans, the fake-gold E on a chain doesn't blend in and doesn't stand out. Her awkwardness is strategic, turning people away in boredom or discomfort before they register the vague, haughty, delicious joy she takes in being alive.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“She comes from fighters—her mom can drive a stick shift, smoke a cigarette, drink a soda, put on mascara, and deliver a smack to every member of the family without taking her eyes off the highway.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“Tory smokes, sitting on the floor with her impeccable posture, the gang of disciples around her. A few are straight, two gay, a couple in between, none more beautiful than her, most of them broken, half parasitic and half delightful. She”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“So much of life is about standing on the curb, wiling to see what rolls up.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“But Elise eclipses the woman from Jamey's future, the lady in tennis whites flashing her diamond as she drinks orange juice fresh-squeezed by a maid. A woman Jamey never quite believed in anyway.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“Seeing herself do this, Elise realizes she always knew she would give the fruit away, at this exact moment, to that girl, with this exact feeling in her heart.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“The gravity of any location pulls citizens to its heart, organizing people by abstractly spiritual geography.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“She switches moods in a heartbeat not because she's out of control - she just doesn't care what it looks like to switch. She watches other people stay in moods just to seem committed to something.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“Many hours later, Elise and Jamey go home, after dancing and fire juggling and ice queens, and they never see Frankie again. He was reunited with his tribe. Everything that was odd and ungainly about him became beautiful in the right crowd.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“Night shift. Jamey raises his arm, and a hundred arms are raised. He smiles, with thousands of teeth. Jamey thinks of Narcissus bending to the pool. He thinks of how a swan on a calm lake is one with its reflection, and then lifting off, the bird divides from its self, and both parts becomes smaller and smaller. Division is more interesting than duplication, and an ax is a fascinating tool. It makes a fallen tree into wood that will keep your family warm. It does more than separate a whole into pieces; it changes the spirit of the thing, its use. He thinks about Elise checking her compact, and how he looks over her shoulder to catch her outlined eye in the mirror. Her eye, separated from the rest of her, floating. Normally he doesn't let his mind split into pieces, because it frightens him, but he's in a container here. He has so much time to think on the night shift.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“A dinner party is the oldest experiment. Trap a bunch of souls in a room. Faces move like painted moons, rising and setting, as talk blows in from the east. The thunk and freckles of a hand slammed down on the table in laughter, the noise of a long night unscrolled like a map. Madeira and Roquefort. Paper towels for napkins. The maroon wall telephone rings: next round of folks on their way!”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“His classes... had committed mutiny. The simplest, most innocent concepts turned overnight into enemies, capable of triggering full system shutdown. Light is not light but energy. A person will never see his own face, just its reflection, or a photograph of it. Brain waves are more active during dreams than waking life. Roses don't smell beautiful; they smell like ripe fruit, which is good for survival, and so they're defined as beautiful in our aesthetic beliefs.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“Good luck with everything. Oh, the world will treat at least half of you like half a person at best, not worth any investment cause you’re already damaged and undereducated and emotionally weird, even though yeah, they can see something kind of great in you, but isn’t it just a losing battle, throwing good money after bad? Your environment is so fucked that your behavior gets more and more impossible, till society claims they can hardly use you for anything but its lowest tasks—an orderly at an old folks’ home, garbage-truck guy—and you’ll barely support yourself. BUT you could try this little piece of candy you put in a pipe, and you’ll be beamed into white light and heavenly love, which will in five minutes turn into a greater problem than you ever knew, so you’ll then have a new problem to solve, and you’ll solve it by doing things you never dreamed of doing. Good luck with that!”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“No one asked Jamey to be the policeman and pastor of egos. Why does he think this is his obligation?”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“No one’s here this time of year except caretakers: often alcoholic friends of the family who can’t handle society, who hide and take care of mansions and animals. He”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“Taped to her wall, where someone else might hang a crucifix, is a page torn from Rolling Stone: Prince in a misty lavender paradise.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“She was handed more personality than other mortals, and chemically fertilized in a glasshouse - now her bionic strength allows her to teleport platters of watercress sandwiches from the kitchen to the library, where she's beating her friends at backgammon.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur

“Binkie, the one and only. He can hear her rings clacking on the plastic phone, and he chuckles, envisioning with amusement the bejeweled and suntanned manicured grip his grandmother thinks she has on his balls. And she does.”
― Jardine Libaire, White Fur