Awayland Quotes

“Love's job is to make a safe place. Not to deny that the spiny forest exists, but to live hidden inside it, tunneled into the soft undergrasses.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Awayland

“You can love as many and as much as you want. I thought I had to save my love up, that I would run out. It turns out it's the exact opposite.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Awayland

“What are you doing?" the mother asked.

"I guess I'm throwing roses," the girl said, unable to make sense of herself.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Awayland

“Too long in seawater can unmake any loveliness.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Awayland

“The girl thought of all the leavings a person does over the course of her life. Leaving the womb, growing up and leaving home, letting go of friends, breakups with lovers, divorce, houses packed up and moved out of. She pictured abandoned, grown-out-of-skins everywhere.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Awayland

“THERE ARE ALSO bodiless mummies, shaped mostly like cats. Empty spaces, preserved forever. They wish to thank their mothers, though they have none. Instead, the nothing mummies would like to thank the priests who made them, carefully as they did, as if what was inside was sacred. As if to wish for a cat is to create one. Before these priests, they were just cat-shaped gusts of air, invisible. Now, they can almost remember what it might have been like to be alive as such a beast. The voles they would have caught. The golden collars they would have worn. The real cat mummies are filled with bones and a heart. The nothing mummies are filled with prayers written on slips of papyrus, organs of faith. If scientists came and cut them open, the nothing mummies wonder: Would the little piece of hieroglyphed papyrus rolling out be any less beautiful than the dried raisin of a heart? Aren’t they not only the container but the prayer itself?”
― Ramona Ausubel, Awayland

“Lucy was the only thing she had not considered: meaningless.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Awayland

“When she was twelve, she had walked from her house to the market with a short list from her mother and it had been peaceful. When she was thirteen, every pickup blew its horn. The drivers whistled. One year, you’re a kid with a carton of milk; the next, you are a body, visible to everyone.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Awayland

“Kit feels a kink in his heart. His girl is in the shower, soaping her every inch of skin. He cannot see the maze of tubes and cavities inside her body. He cannot know what is pumping right and what is pumping wrong, how each of those slippery organs is tucked against its neighbor and whether something bad is truly blooming there. Whether, even if her body is perfect, a truck will lose its brakes, tumble off the road where Summer is walking. There are storms beginning to twist in the warm oceans to the south, and maybe they will whip this way, tearing the houses like paper. The ferry could sink beneath them; poisoned gases could leak into the air at any time. The melted ice caps are washing toward them. They’re both dying- everyone is. The schedule of death is not made public. Love’s job is to make a safe place. Not to deny that the spiny forest exists, but to live hidden inside it, tunneled into the soft undergrass”
― Ramona Ausubel, Awayland

“We got dressed as soon as we were finished and sat in his living room and drank mint tea and I said, "What makes you want a baby anyway?" and he said, "Can you imagine how it must feel to love someone from the moment they begin to exist? To know that you'll never not love them?”
― Ramona Ausubel, Awayland

“She has been pretty a long time, and she is curious what the world looks like for someone who is invisible to men. What will it be like to walk down the street without getting the looks from every truck driver, every guy standing outside in the bitter cold, his own stale breath billowing out as dark and dirty as smoke?”
― Ramona Ausubel, Awayland