The Incendiaries Quotes

“Intact families sat in the blue wash of television light, tranquil, like drowned statues.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“I believe that we, in the attempt to live, invented Him. But if I could, I'd ask Him to give you everything.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“Phoebe, you’re a capable girl, but I’m afraid being alone isn’t a skill. It’s a disposition.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“I ate pain. I swilled tears. If I could take enough in, I'd have no space left to fit my own.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“By the time I quit, I realized I’d rather have no talent than just enough to know how much I lacked.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“People with no experience of God tend to think that leaving the faith would be a liberation, a flight from guilt, rules, but what I couldn't forget was the joy I'd known, loving Him.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“I’ve wondered if I’ve stopped being able to want, but maybe it’s just that what I most wish to have again is not, at this point, available.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“If you love to win, as I did, it’s not enough to do well. Others also have to fail.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“It must have been so hard, though, she said, expanding. She intended to sympathize, I could tell, and it was true: I'd tried not to leave the faith. I'd had such purpose, living in single-minded pursuit of the God I loved, until the afternoon I knelt in my bedroom, asking one last time for a sign. White gauze curtains rippled. I waited, but I heard nothing else. Muscles stiff, I got up. I should, I think, have told Phoebe how cut open I felt since then, with a God-shaped hole I didn't know how to fill. If I was sick of Christ, it was because I hadn't been able to stop loving Him, this made-up ghost I still grieves as though He'd been real.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“Do you mind if I ask what made you stop believing?

It was nothing special, I said. The usual host of reasons.

Like what?

Oh, the existence of multiple religions, children starving. The problem of evil- it's how people talk about going bankrupt, right? It's gradual, then it happens all at once.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“I hesitated. She hadn't mentioned a religious upbringing; I knew I'd alluded to mine. I'd joked about it, I was sure. When I was Christian, I said, at times, playing my life's pivotal loss as a joke. Now, I told Phoebe that I'd attended a Bible College before Edwards. Up until I stopped believing in God, I said. I thought I was chosen by Christ. Hand-picked to preach his word. Don't laugh, but I used to peddle salvation outside of town bars, hoping to catch drunks when they'd be extra sentimental. IT worked, too. I was good at it. In the back of my Bible. I listed all the souls I saved.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“I watched the protest pass, sick with longing. Such a lot of people who still believed they were picked to be God’s children.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“she turned toward me, still unconscious, wrapping me in limbs and warmth, this bleeding, feverish creature I didn’t know how to stop wanting.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“It's often all people want, urging a change: be like me, shaped in this image.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“That night, I told my mother I had no option but to quit the piano. I won't be delusional, I said. I didn't have the talent. It wasn't enough to be good. I could see no point in devoting this life to music if I wouldn't add to what leading pianists, the ones I idolized, had achieved. I shouldn't waste time trying.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“you’re a capable girl, but I’m afraid being alone isn’t a skill. It’s a disposition.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“Faces lit up if I walked into a room, the liking a light I could refract, giving it back. Phoebe, oh, I love that girl, people said, but it's possible they all just loved the reflected selves.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“Light spilled through closed eyelids, and I was turning into gold.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“It had rained his first day out of the gulag, the lines slanting like marionette strings.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“joke. I hadn’t talked much with Liesl, but I would: in time, she’d confide in me, as well. The dad she’d idolized, who left; the men like beads on the string of a furious mother’s life. The anorexic spells. She’d been locked up in a clinic. Obliged to eat, to weigh in. Like a pig for the kill, she said.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“If I asked the first question, then if I listened, head tilted, providing attention, they let me ask again.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“In a lifetime, the average woman will eat her weight in lipstick. To covet is to begin to have.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“They’d have gathered on a rooftop in Noxhurst to watch the explosion.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“I kissed bitten nails that shine, in hindsight, like quartz, spoils I pulled down from the moon.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“At the bottom of everything there is the hallelujah. —CLARICE LISPECTOR, Água Viva”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries