Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories Quotes

“There is, at its center, something immutably miraculous about the substance and process of reading stories. We read because we hunger to know, to empathize, to feel, to connect, to laugh, to fear, to wonder, and to become, with each page, more than ourselves. To become creatures with souls. We read because it allows us, through force of mind, to hold hands, touch lives, speak as another speaks, listen as another listens, and feel as another feels. We read because we wish to journey forth together. There is, despite everything, a place for empathy and compassion and rumination, and just knowing that fact, for me, is an occasion for joy. That we still, in this frenetic and bombastic and self-centered age, have legions of people who can and do return to the quietness of the page, opening their minds and hearts, again and again, to the wild world and the stuff of life, pinned into scenes and characters and sharp images and pretty sentences--well. It sure feels like a miracle, doesn't it?”
― Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

“I dream of a garden overripe and wild. Of a woman gathering the sea into her hands and letting it fall in many colored petals to a green, green earth. I dream of words on a page transforming to birds, and birds transforming to children, and children transforming to stars.”
― Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

“He feels a needle in his heart, and he sees her wince. Is it the same needle? he wonders. Is it the same thread, pulling at my heart and her heart?”
― Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

“I will catch you. I will claim you. I will love you to bits.”

As I love you, the junk man’s daughter thinks. As I love you and love you and love you. And she does. She loves him so much. As she loves everyone. It is dangerous, this love, and she can’t control it. It is ever so much bigger than she, and growing by the day. It is a river. An ocean. The sky. Her love crushes planets, shatters suns, burns whole galaxies to cinders and dust.

“And then, child, I will drain you.”

Yes, she thinks. You can try.

“Do you hear me? I WILL DRAIN YOU DRY.”

Try, she thinks. Try and you will drown in it. You will drown, and drown, and drown.”
― Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

“To be human is to lie, after all. Our minds tell lies to our hearts and our hearts tell lies to our souls.”
― Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

“She lives, she knows, in a village of idiots situated at the edge of a nation of morons. There are worse things, of course.
Though, in truth, not many.”
― Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

“Fran was, she saw, surrounded by idiots. And she couldn't slip away.”
― Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

“Lost, yes, but there was a freedom in being lost. There was a freedom in abandonment too, if you thought about it right.”
― Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

“They are sun and water and wave. Kinetic energy. They are comet and star and nebula. The vacuum of space. The multilayered folds of time. They are all these things at once.”
― Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

“Already, she can feel her body yearning to disassemble, fly apart, scatter across the landscape like mist. It doesn’t frighten her, this thought of her own dissolution. She only wants to make it matter.”
― Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

“The Sparrow feels her heart in her throat. She smiles. Her body feels more discombobulated than usual. As though each particle is only barely hanging on to the others. As though she may fly apart at any moment. She is hot. She is cold. She shivers all over.”
― Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

“No one noticed the strange glitter of her terrible beauty. Or, at least, they pretended not to notice.”
― Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

“A soldier will do as he is told, but a seaman is beholden to his conscience and his soul.”
― Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

“Each jagged shard of light in the darkness is a tiny message sent from the recesses of time. “You are alone,” the stars say. “You are alone. You are still alone.”
― Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

“It seemed to Father Laurence that their life’s purpose now was to make him feel as though they were in the midst of slowly stoning him to death using only popcorn and lost buttons and bits of yarn.”
― Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

“It is our flaws that make us beloved by heaven. It is our scars and handicaps and lack of symmetry that prove that we are-or once were-alive.”
― Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

“The dead have buried the dead, and the living scramble and struggle as best they can. They press their shoulder against the rock and urge forward, even when all hope is lost.”
― Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

“Someone will have to show her how to take care of her lady bits when they change and how to shoo the boys away when they come sniffing around. Someone will have to teach her how to protect herself”
― Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories