We Contain Multitudes Quotes

“Adam," my brother said, "let's not be the type of people who are afraid to live because we might die.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“You undid me, Kurl, in more ways than one.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“We’re all bending over backward to get you to crack a smile, because when you smile it feels like the sun coming out.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“How is anybody supposed to hide happiness like this?”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“Maybe it is always like this. We are granted these tiny windows of time, these small pockets of space, where nothing else intrudes. Maybe that's all we can ever hope to get, together. And maybe, just maybe, it will be enough.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“let’s not be the type of people who are afraid to live because we might die.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“I am jealous. I’m envious of the easy options all the rest of you enjoy. To date someone or not to date someone? Does she like him? Does he like her? You can try out whatever you like and change your minds at any time. Everyone is available to everyone else. Me? I might be permitted to admire someone from afar, to harbor a yearning in secret, but to act on it would cost me everything.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“...it looks like this whole earth was just reborn into an entirely new universe full of possibilities.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“It wasn’t just the heat of the moment. Ask me for anything. The answer is yes.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“Your scent, Jo. It’s like wool and bread and something else. I don’t know. A scent like if laughter had a scent, or daybreak. You filled the whole car with a yellow light like daybreak. I swear it felt like light pouring into my veins.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“I want to walk down the hallways of Lincoln High with one part of me in the eternal, the timeless, and the other part of me slipping so fast through the here and now that nobody can pin me down, not even the butcherboys.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“I don't know what was in my head before I met you. What did I even think about? Because whatever it was, it's not in there anymore. It's gone. I am completely, one hundred percent all the time filled up with you.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“My beautiful, laughable fable of a life.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“It’s an amazing phenomenon: Every time I reread your letter that says “Ask me for anything,” I find there is nothing more I need or want.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“Like that time you were half-asleep and rolled with your shoulder in my larynx and said, “Can you breathe?” And I couldn’t really but didn’t need to either, because air seemed unnecessary with all that happiness in my chest.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“A word kept flashing in my head. One word, over and over, like a flashing neon sign. Lucky.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“The sight of you shot something strong and bright through my veins. I swear my mouth started to water. It must be how a dog feels when its master comes home. Joy coursing through its whole body.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“These little things you do. All the little gestures, your quick nervous fingers. I watch you do these things and I think, how could I ever be unhappy? How could anything ever bother me?”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“And then I'll read one of your letters and think, People have no idea what I'm like. I mean the gap between what people see and what's actually in my head sort of shocks me when I read your letters. I guess everyone has this gap. It's just that they don't come face-to-face with it very often.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“Maybe I am "queer as in weird", as you theorize so eloquently. But my weirdness is merely a natural by-product of having my sight in something beyond high school, namely poetry.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“What I wrote about in the essay was about grass growing from the mouths of corpses.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“I was asleep almost before I could close the flap on the tent.
Sleeping all day. This must be one of the ways people hide from pain.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“Now - right now, right this second - is the only time we are alive. Our minds can live in the past or worry about the future, but our bodies are only alive and feeling things right here, right now.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“Walt says simple things but the meaning isn't simple. You have to understand them not with your mind but with your body.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“In my experience, it’s always the one in the group whose own position is most precarious, the one who walks the thin, thin line between insider and outcast—you can count on it, it’ll be him who hits the hardest, who laughs the loudest. The other butcherboys don’t particularly care whether I live or die, but this one, this Dowell—he’s the one who really hates me. Because Dowell knows, and he knows I know, that he’s a lot closer to being like me than his so-called friends are.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“But my weirdness is merely a natural by-product of having my sights set on something beyond high school, namely poetry.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“They don’t”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes