The Gunners Quotes

“He said, “I think at various times in life we’re either more or less true to who we really are.”
― Rebecca Kauffman, The Gunners

“That word love... it was scary and outlandish to him. But what was life if not a long series of scary and outlandish things you did and said and asked of your heart, so you could carry the wild and unreasonable hope that someday someone would hold your face and say, You are perfect. You can rest now. You were always perfect to me. Not because you were even remotely close to perfect, or brave, or strong, or even very good, but because you had been very dear friends for a very long time.”
― Rebecca Kauffman, The Gunners

“There was always that other feeling, crouched and waiting nearby in the shadows, even at a moment like this, even when he was on the brink of the most beautiful thing he would ever see in his life. It was the low tide. The sacred, empty void after the birds had taken flight. The tangled thing that tugged on Mikey, kept him sewn up inside himself, made happiness hard. Mikey didn’t yet have words for this feeling, but already at this young age, he understood that it would never leave him entirely—nature had put it in his heart, and there it would always remain, even when he thought he was in the clear, even when he thought he had left it behind.”
― Rebecca Kauffman, The Gunners

“What’s the alternative to living with something that hurts?” Alice said. “Jump off a bridge?” She hesitated. “I don’t mean that as a joke. How does anybody live with anything? You just . . . march on, I guess, even when your heart’s not in it.”
― Rebecca Kauffman, The Gunners

“That makes my vagina contract and disappear inside itself.

Sam said, Mine too.”
― Rebecca Kauffman, The Gunners

“Mikey had asked his father about this feeling once, years earlier, when he was very small and before he had learned that it was foolish to talk plainly about feelings. Mikey had said, "I have a bad, sad feeling in me sometimes." His father said, "Me, too." And knowing that his father shared this had been such a great comfort to Mikey that over time he began to cherish that shadowy feeling, which proved to be as sure as the tides, as persistent and reliable as a dear friend, as real and as much a part of his universe as the sun.”
― Rebecca Kauffman, The Gunners

“Love,” Lee announced, “is not a mystery. It is not poetry, it is not pure, it is not sacred. Nothing humans do is.” The room, already quiet, was now completely silent. “Love,” Lee continued, “is simply the time you spend loving. There are no other rules. That’s it.”
― Rebecca Kauffman, The Gunners

“For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live
permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.”
― Rebecca Kauffman, The Gunners

“Love,” Lee continued, “is simply the time you spend loving. There are no other rules. That’s it.”
― Rebecca Kauffman, The Gunners

“What a universe. There was so much to see! So much to feel! And yet, if there was one think Mikey knew of feelings... There was always that other feeling, crouched and waiting nearby in the shadows, even at a moment like this, even when he was on the brink of the most beautiful thing he would ever see in his life. It was the low tide. The sacred, empty void after the birds had taken flight. The tangled thing that tugged on Mikey, kept him sewn up inside himself, made happiness hard. Mikey didn’t yet have words for this feeling, but already at this young age, he understood that it would never leave him entirely—nature had put it in his heart, and there it would always remain, even when he thought he was in the clear, even when he thought he had left it behind.
Mikey had asked his father about this feeling once, years earlier, when he was very small and before he had learned that it was foolish to talk plainly about feelings. Mikey had said, "I have a bad, sad feeling in me sometimes." His father said, "Me, too." And knowing that his father shared this had been such a great comfort to Mikey that over time he began to cherish that shadowy feeling, which proved to be as sure as the tides, as persistent and reliable as a dear friend, as real and as much a part of his universe as the sun.”
― Rebecca Kauffman, The Gunners

“Alice said, “I think we were all sort of in love with each other at different times. Isn’t that just what happens when friends grow up together?”
― Rebecca Kauffman, The Gunners

“When they could not reach any single conclusion as to what might have caused Sally to turn on them, they began to turn on one another, with accusations and assumptions, resentment and suspicion. The Gunners found themselves behaving like strangers toward one another in the halls of school and the streets of Lackawanna for their remaining months of high school.”
― Rebecca Kauffman, The Gunners

“As children, The Gunners could not have imagined that by the time they were sixteen years old, one of them would turn her back on the others, and the group would be so fractured by the loss, the sudden and unexplained absence of this one, that within weeks the other friendships would also dissolve, leaving each of them in a dark and confounding solitude. Mikey Callahan became a sinkhole; everything inside sort of loosened and then just collapsed.”
― Rebecca Kauffman, The Gunners

“Sometimes,” Sally said. “But sometimes they go for reasons the scientists don’t understand. Sometimes . . . well . . . it’s like sometimes nature just puts something in their heart that makes them need to go, and so they go.”
― Rebecca Kauffman, The Gunners