His Favorites Quotes

“I don’t know how others reconcile what happened before with what happens now. For me, the past is a cool, dark pond in which I will always stand partially submerged. That’s just the way it is.”
― Kate Walbert, His Favorites

“From here there is never not a day without Master’s shadow across my life—a solid bar, a locked turnstile that brings me up short, trapped on the other side of where I thought I was going, the place I once imagined I would be.”
― Kate Walbert, His Favorites: A Novel

“No, I say. In no moral universe would this not be a crime, I say.
I was a child, I tell him.
Shame on you, I say. Shame on you, I say. Shame on you.
And he laughs and reaches out for me.
“You are cute as pie when you’re angry,” he says.
“Come here,” he says.
“How old are you again?” he says.
“Close your eyes,” he says.”
― Kate Walbert, His Favorites

“Thank you for listening, he wrote.
Dear Beautiful, he wrote.
I know I can trust you, he wrote.
I think of you all day, he wrote.
I wonder how you taste, he wrote.
Secret-keeper, he wrote.”
― Kate Walbert, His Favorites

“-they were all so clearly portraits of the kind of girl who should be mourned, who should be missed given her do-goodness, her smile, her kindness toward others, and not portraits of any actual girl I knew.”
― Kate Walbert, His Favorites

“I would leave the story here-the snow erasing the day so that none of the rest of it ever happened, like when a film gets stuck in a projector, the images consumed, distorted, vanished. All traces gone.”
― Kate Walbertlbert, His Favorites

“So here is what actually happened, what happens still: the scene on its parallel track to now, to me: linear and constant, never passing into the past, never speeding into the future.”
― Kate Walbert, His Favorites

“I should have smashed those spectacles to glass so fine he would never not remember how I ruined his vision - decisive, quick, imperative - and wrecked that world of his own making, its heroes, its scholars, it founding members, generals, politicians, row after row after row after row of men and not real and not true for me, for me, not how I was, or what I saw and thought. Not anything. I could have; I should have; I did not.

But I was fifteen. I could no more have formed those words, those thoughts, than flown to the moon.”
― Kate Walbert, His Favorites