My Absolute Darling Quotes

“Hold tight to the world and do not let go and do not fuck this up.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“He has a way of watching her that makes her feel as if she is the most important thing in the world.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“Dude, with your voice you are like, 'Look at all these books I've read,' but with your eyes you are like, 'Help me.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“I want to survive this. She is surprised by the depth and clarity of her desire.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“The time will come when your soul must be absolute with your conviction, and whatever your spread, and howsoever fast you are, you will only succeed if you fight like a fucking angel, fallen to fucking earth, with a heart absolute and full of conviction, without hesitation, doubt, or fear, no part of yourself divided against the other”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“You want to give up and you start thinking maybe it's a good idea because the pain of holding on ... because then it wouldn't hurt anymore. Because holding steady is- is-
There is this bad, really bad, sense of uncertainty, an uncertainty so painful, so asshole-clenching, that it becomes- It's an awful thing to say, but it's easier to let go and be split in half than it is to try and hold on, suffering and not knowing what is going to happen. That is courage. Taking your own fucking life in your own fucking hands when that is the hardest thing you can do. No one thinks of it. Everyone thinks they'd do the right thing, but that's not true. They don't understand how scary it is. How hard it is. No one understands unless they've been there. We're there now, Jacob, and you're gonna do the right thing despite the fear and despite the hurt.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“It will go badly for me, but the hell. I am a girl things go badly for”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“You need to surrender yourself to death before you ever begin, and accept your life as a state of grace, and then and only then will you be good enough.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“I told him how we were washed out to sea and how it was like making furious love to a clash of orgiastic rhinos in a swimming pool filled with broken glass, and how you made a fire by staring balefully down into the reflective bottom of an aluminum can until your immense force of will was concentrated and magnified by the parabolic mirror into a white-hot spark of pure Turtle rage that could light anything on fire, even the hearts of unwary high schoolers.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“Her moments of happiness occur right at the margin of unbearable. She knows it will not last and she thinks, you can never forget, Turtle, what is like, here, without him. You have to hold tight on to it, how good it is.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“She just wants to build a garden and water it and have everything grow and everything stay alive and she does not want to feel besieged”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“She needs to get up and go home. She knows it, but she just doesn’t go”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“You are supposed to come to the door and believe that hell awaits just on the other side, believe that this house is full of nightmares; every personal demon you have, every worst fear”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“At his best, we are more than all right. At his best he rises above all of it and he is more than any of them. But there is something in him. A flaw that poisons all the rest.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“when just being fast and accurate won’t be enough. The time will come when your soul must be absolute with your conviction”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“She strips and cleans the SIG Sauer by the light of the oil lamp. She taps the magazine in and racks the slide and puts the gun to her temple, just to remind herself that she is never so trapped that she cannot escape. You have lost your guts. Lost your courage. You are disgraced. But, you are still here.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“The truth is that things do not work out, that there are no solutions, and you can go a year, a whole year, and be no better, no more healed, maybe even worse, be so skittish that if you’re walking down the street with Anna, and if someone opens a car door and gets out and slams the door you turn around, honest-to-god ready to kill them, turn around so fast that Anna, who knows what is happening, cannot even open her mouth in time and then you’re standing there, crying, and there’s some guy in a leather jacket and a fedora getting out of his Volkswagen Rabbit staring at you like, is this girl all right? and you want to be like, this girl is not all right, this girl will never be all right.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“she is a person like him, but she is not him, nor is she just a part of him”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“It’s an awful thing to say, but it’s easier to let go and be split in fucking half than it is to try and hold on, suffering and not knowing what is going to happen. That’s courage. Taking your own fucking life in your own fucking hands when that is the hardest thing you can do. No one thinks of it. Everybody thinks they’d do the right thing, but that’s not true. They don’t understand how scary it is. How hard it is. No one understands unless they’ve been there.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“Nothing is as difficult as a sustained and unremitting contact with your own mind. She thinks, does it matter if it is difficult? It doesn’t matter. It is still better.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“She thinks, you are bound to make mistakes, and if you are unwilling to make mistakes, you will forever be held hostage at the beginning of a thing, you have to stop being afraid, Turtle. You have to get in the practice of being swift and deliberate, or one day, hesitation will fuck you.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“Turtle pense, Appuie sur la détente. Elle n'imagine aucune autre voie. Elle pense, Appuie sur la détente. Mais si tu n'appuies pas, retourne dans le ruisseau, franchis à nouveau la porte, prends possession de ton esprit car ton inaction est en train de te tuer. Elle reste assise à contempler la plage et elle pense, Je veux survivre à tout ça. Elle est surprise par la profondeur et la clarté de son désir. Sa gorge se serre, elle retire le fusil de sa bouche, des filets de salive accompagnent le mouvement, elle les essuie. Elle se lève, regarde les vagues, pénétrée par leur beauté. Son esprit tout entier lui paraît réceptif et brut. Elle éprouve une gratitude fulgurante et immense, un émerveillement spontané pour le monde entier.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“Marcus Aurelius says,” Jacob continues, “that ‘joy for humans lies in human actions: kindness to others, contempt of the senses, the interrogation of appearances, observation of nature and of events in nature.’ This—loaning you my bag—satisfies all of those conditions. Please take it.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“I’m taking her to Understuff. Homeslice needs a bra.” “You’re not,” Jacob says. “I am, too, dingus,” Imogen says. “I am not a dingus,” Jacob says. “Social media is gonna ban all photos of her and she won’t have any friends and then she will die alone drinking wine from a box and her hundreds of cats will close in and eat her face.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“domestic competence utterly alien to her, a kind of miracle. He is saying, “I am in love with George Eliot! My god! Middlemarch! That is a motherfucking book right there! Such a book—! She has a wonderful, broad, generous style; she writes the way I want my letters to Congress to sound, you know?”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“She leaves parts of herself unnamed and unexamined, and then he will name them, and she will see herself clearly in his words and hate herself.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“the lattice of bones, the grooved condyles like volute woodwork,”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling