Tangerine Quotes

“Everything changes, sooner or later. Time moves along, without constraints—no matter how hard one may attempt to pause, to alter, to rewrite it.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“Time moves quickly, I have found, turning people and places into first history and then later stories.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“She was put together nicely, with the intention of others not noticing. There was nothing about her that clamored for attention, nothing that demanded to be seen, and yet, everything was done exactly in anticipation of such notice.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“Tangier and Lucy were the same, I thought. Both unsolvable riddles that refused to leave me in peace. And I had tired of it - of the not knowing, of always feeling as though I were on the outside of things, just on the periphery.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“Whatever symbiosis existed between us was real, tangible, and now, without her presence I could feel the absence of it, as if she were an extension of my own person. She was, I realized, that awful, wretched part of me that should be locked away and boarded up forever - like Jane's madwoman in the attic. She was the unfiltered version, the rawness that no one should ever see. She was every wicked thought, every forbidden desire turned real and visceral.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“It was not my home. It had never been my home. All I had done was create an enclosure that I had trapped myself within.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“Covet. It was a peculiar word. One I tended to associate with long, dull lectures on Hawthorne and other early American writers from the Puritan age. I had to look it up once, as part of an essay I had been forced to write in school. What I found was: to desire wrongfully, inordinately, or without due regard for the rights of others. There were other definitions. More words, different words, although all of them meant the same thing. But it was that first part that had stayed with me: to desire wrongfully.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“I puzzled over the difference in words—between tourist and traveler.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“The idea of her trapped behind a heavy book seemed somehow wrong—she was made of lightness and air, she was made, it seemed, for living, rather than reading about the experiences of other lives.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“..... how could I blame this place, Tangier, when I had brought the problems myself? They had not manifested out of the cracks and corners of the sidewalks around me; no, they had been born and bred somewhere else, had followed me here because I had ignored them, had followed the fog to hide what I already knew.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“I thought of what she had said earlier, about the different names that Tangier had had over the course of history. In some ways, I felt like it was appropriate to the moment - we were both of us in the same place, but in two very different versions of Tangier, and I could not imagine hers, a place of excitement, a place to start anew. Mine held only fear and isolation.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“The feelings I had felt toward Lucy, I often thought, were something like this - something sharper than a normal friendship, something that I felt threatened to overwhelm and, quite possibly, destroy. There were moments when I had thought that I did not so much as want her, as I wanted to be her.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“You cry when you arrive, and you cry when you leave.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“Gone was the girl, the young woman who had loved so carelessly, so blindly, that she was willing to do anything to keep that love.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“I had been frightened then, and though I was still frightened now, I was tired of running.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“This metamorphosis, it seemed, was dependent on rebirth, and so death must also be a part of it, the two inherently linked.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“It seemed as though everything, each and every strand of my life, was tied to this place, would always be tied to this place, no matter how much distance I were to put between us.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“It all seems too much, in a way. That such misfortune should fall upon one girl, so many times.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“Or perhaps it was the simple realization that the one woman I had always trusted, the only real family I had left, had abandoned me, betrayed me.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“But at that moment, I saw something only ominous and warning, a threat that I could never quite manage to elude.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“There was something that he wanted from me - no, it was more than that. Something he thought he could get - perhaps deserved, was owed.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“But the words felt too dangerous to speak aloud, the walls too thin, too tenuous.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“But my name, my face - both of these were a mystery to him, and ones I suspected he was not intent on solving.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“But then, that feeling of euphoria shifted, tilted, replaced instead by a growing urgency, a sense that something was wrong, the realization pulling me under, further and further, until I could no longer find my way out from under it.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“I hated her for her weakness, her spinelessness, for always going back on the decision she made.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“I must not stop, I must not think too hard. At the end of it, I knew, all would be right.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“I thought of all those terrible cliches I'd read in books my entire life and I felt and understood every single wretched one in that moment.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“Now he was angry, unamused by my continued presence, and perhaps most important, he was threatened.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“I would never really fit in, never really be one of them, that was what he was trying to say. Those girls from good families, those effortless girls. The ones who woke up with long blond shiny hair, pale, non-descript features, an aquiline nose that spoke of wealth and good breeding. Girls who did not have to work for their supper, who only had to look first to Daddy and then to their husband. I was different, marked out.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“But now, I knew - that the past was never truly past, and that I could not outrun it forever, that the fog would not always protect me.”
― Christine Mangan, Tangerine