Everyone Knows You Go Home Quotes

“Just because you have no choice doesn’t mean you’ll be able to live with the decision.”
― Natalia Sylvester, Everyone Knows You Go Home

“Things here were new, clean, better. But there were days when he felt he had traded his life for somebody else’s and gotten the wrong size.”
― Natalia Sylvester, Everyone Knows You Go Home

“ranunculus”
― Natalia Sylvester, Chasing the Sun

“Some people have holes in their hearts not even time can fill, but that doesn’t mean they’re broken.”
― Natalia Sylvester, Everyone Knows You Go Home

“moment. “They’re just like la sirena de Huacachina,” I said. According to Peruvian legend, a young Inca princess turned into a mermaid centuries ago in the desert oasis now known as Huacachina.”
― Natalia Sylvester, Breathe and Count Back from Ten

“They were married on the Day of the Dead, el Día de los Muertos, which no one gave much thought to in all the months of planning, until the bride’s deceased father-in-law showed up in the car following the ceremony.”
― Natalia Sylvester, Everyone Knows You Go Home

“Here, she was an uninvited guest in a home she didn’t want to disturb.”
― Natalia Sylvester, Everyone Knows You Go Home

“She could sense that this part of the journey was the most critical. It was in the way the coyote mimed to them, uttering not even a whisper when hours ago he would have shouted. In the way she could see nothing, and therefore felt like she was nothing, traveling through nowhere. There was no longer any going forward or back. Not to the home she had left. Not to the place she was headed to. Yes, they were deep in the border now, a place so dangerous even maps had no names for it. She pictured them all then, tiny black dots blending into a thick-lined border.”
― Natalia Sylvester, Everyone Knows You Go Home

“It was nice to have shown him something new. It’d been so long since she had felt there were parts of her unknown to him, and she’d begun to feel like a barren field, unworthy of exploring. That was the thing about sharing your life with someone. Curiosity brought you together, but that enchantment is not infinite.”
― Natalia Sylvester, Everyone Knows You Go Home

“At least they were peaceful, at least they became well rehearsed at avoiding each other’s eyes. They were hyperaware of their bodies and personal space, in which they each orbited without crossing into the other’s. Their gravity didn’t allow for touching. It was practically a new form of intimacy.”
― Natalia Sylvester, Everyone Knows You Go Home

“If not for his wife squeezing his hand every half hour or so, telling him, 'Soon, mi amor. Soon,' he would no longer have any sense of time. They could walk for the rest of their days, die among the barren rocks of the desert, and never know how old they had turned, how much life they had sacrificed for this new beginning. He had always thought crossing the border would be hardest, but now he suspected it was this, the in-between, the stretches of miles for the forgotten, when they could become lost but never mourned, or found but tossed back, turned away as if they had never arrived.”
― Natalia Sylvester, Everyone Knows You Go Home

“Somebody slammed the door shut over their bodies, jolting them toward the ground and back up again. Outside, all sounds were muffled. Inside, their hearts and lungs pounded. The car started, and they began moving. The vibrations of the engine seeped into her body, aching like a million little needles.

It seemed useless to pray. Who protects the invisible?”
― Natalia Sylvester, Everyone Knows You Go Home

“the deepest form of humiliation isn’t experienced in the eyes of others, but in the lonely desperation of oneself.”
― Natalia Sylvester, Chasing the Sun

“Youth doesn’t always make one ignorant. Some simply struggle with the knowledge of the pieces they’re missing.”
― Natalia Sylvester, Chasing the Sun

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife . . .”
― Natalia Sylvester, Chasing the Sun

“Marabela didn’t just wake up one morning and think she wanted to leave; she simply realized the time had finally arrived. their marriage didn’t change from night to day; there were sunrises, and sunsets, and times when the sky was neither dark nor light, when the dawns and the dusks became indistinguishable from the constant fog they tried to ignore.”
― Natalia Sylvester, Chasing the Sun

“your”
― Natalia Sylvester, Chasing the Sun

“there was a time when this home was her domain. Sometimes she felt proud of it, sometimes she felt tied to it, but whether it was a burden or a blessing, it was hers to keep. She’d known better than anyone what this house needed; lately it’d become one of the few aspects of her life she could control. there is no corner, no ridge along the steps or crack along the wall, that she doesn’t know like her own body. the house may never have been the sanctuary she’d always dreamed of, but at least it carried no surprises. It was comfortable.”
― Natalia Sylvester, Chasing the Sun

“He recognized his own fear in them, and now that he knows what it looks like he sees it everywhere — in the man who pumps gas across the street, in the teenage girls who stumble down the sidewalk, in the transvestite prostitute who steps forward and back, indecisive, at the intersection while Andres prays for the light to turn green. It is a fear that he can’t get away from, and seeing it in others doesn’t make him feel any safer.”
― Natalia Sylvester, Chasing the Sun

“All they could tell him was that they needed to wait. Esperar. Andres doesn’t understand how one word ever gave birth to the other. There is no hope left in waiting.”
― Natalia Sylvester, Chasing the Sun

“Marabela always says that things are funniest when they have hints of truth to them. Perhaps, he thinks, they’re also saddest when that truth has faded. Enough putting”
― Natalia Sylvester, Chasing the Sun

“he is truly worried. Ever since Marabela left, he has been careful not to ask anything of her. Not for a section of the paper in the morning. Not for a kiss good night in the evening. He has not even asked her for a quick glance to check if he’s shaved his sideburns evenly. If she’s left him again, he’ll have no one to blame but himself. He should have stuck to what was working for them—ask nothing and expect no problems in return.”
― Natalia Sylvester, Chasing the Sun