Vanishing Twins Quotes

“It’s like we’re the same person. We finish each other’s sentences. This is what we’ve been taught to desire and expect of love. But there’s a question underneath that’s never addressed: once you find someone to finish your sentences, do you stop finishing them for yourself?”
― Leah Dieterich, Vanishing Twins: A Marriage

“That’s very Chantal Mouffe of you ;) Eric wrote. She has a theory called Agonism that says there’s no such thing as true consensus, but that the struggle for it should be seen as positive. These were the magic words, the theory that worked for me. I’d always seen struggle as negative, something to be hurried through on the way to agreement, a state I associated with a deep and pleasing harmony. I had forgotten that harmony requires at least two different voices singing two different notes.”
― Leah Dieterich, Vanishing Twins: A Marriage

“In many cultures, seeing a person’s doppelgänger is bad luck. It means they might be in danger or become ill. Seeing your own doppelgänger is worse. An omen of death.”
― Leah Dieterich, Vanishing Twins: A Marriage

“Watching myself on film was different from looking in a mirror. My mirror self was ever and always now, whereas the filmic me was caught in time. My filmic image seemed to have more autonomy; its movements on-screen were its own, unlike my mirror image, whose movements were just copies of mine. Perhaps this is what it’s like for a twin to see her sister from across the room at a party. To watch as she pours herself a glass of wine from a table of half-empty bottles and talks to a guy wearing a jean jacket with a hole in one elbow. She picks the skin on her thumb with her index finger, and then, finding that insufficient, pulls at the dry and ragged skin with her front teeth the way a dog pulls meat from a bone.”
― Leah Dieterich, Vanishing Twins: A Marriage

“We reached inside each other as though reaching into our mothers, trying to pull our long-lost twins out by the hand. Come! Come! Our voices echoed. I cannot face this world without you. The air is dry. The mirrors are glass. I need your gaze to show me who I am.”
― Leah Dieterich, Vanishing Twins: A Marriage

“She resided so effortlessly between the masculine and the feminine. I wanted to follow her into that space because it didn’t seem written.”
― Leah Dieterich, Vanishing Twins: A Marriage