Those Who Knew Quotes

“What political favors were not ultimately about pig shit and how to get rid of it?”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“To kiss a man who understood none of the connotations of her country had been like a vacation from herself.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“that she was trailing him because trauma made a kite of the mind and there was no telling what kind of wind might take hold of it.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“He wondered what it would take for there to be a true reckoning with the repressive roles men imposed on each other, a moment when acting despotic would finally be recognized as the weakness that it was.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“She had a delicate, chiseled face but there was something ferocious about her, too—a scrutiny of the world so intense it bordered on sensual.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“There was really no predicting where, or when, the least lonely years of one’s adult life might begin.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“To win, you have to hide what you have more of than anyone else.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“Wasn’t this one of the ways women unraveled? They failed to marry at the expected age, they got lonelier, stuck on some ex-lover’s success while they remained trapped in one demoralizing position after another, their thoughts growing increasingly erratic and unhinged.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“He’d signed up for some cheap language classes to better grasp what was going on—how to reply, for example, when two drunk women in what looked like painted Santa beards asked if he’d come to join their revolution.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“She had assured him she’d told no one about her trips to his apartment, but she was a girl, and girls were feline, always purring up to one another with their secrets.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“The second woman had seemed just as bull-like and resentful.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“How could he be both of these men?”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“Why you married this monster is beyond me.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“A school she visited the month before had not even had a working water fountain. In the classroom she'd observed there, two windows had been patched with masking tape and cardboard. Halfway through the class, a scrawny, feral-looking cat had slipped beneath the cardboard and hissed at a boy seated near the window. The teacher remarked on none of it. He'd just gone on lecturing in a resigned monotone until the cat drew closer and the boy smacked it with a notebook.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“But, once again, Lena had wound herself too tightly around her own version to question it. In her adamant, emphatic way, Lena insisted...”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“It was an embrace that spoke of history, of deep affection, the kind of genuine embrace he'd missed in this year of wandering, and before it in the small city where he'd been living and knew almost no one. Wasn't that the cost, above all, of his habitual dissatisfaction--of having no deeper continuous history with anyone beyond his bitterly divorced parents, and one culinary school friend who'd kept him on her group emails?
With envy, he watched Lena stop again to speak to a couple by the door.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“Already in your last term in political science, he said, how excellent. I hope you'll consider something with the government when you graduate. I mean that. We really need more smart young women in office--in absolutely every position.
When the girl sucked in her breath, Victor suggested she contact his office the following spring about working on his reelection campaign. We'll just be getting started. He met her eyes and watched her nervously flick her hair again, felt his body willing itself closer. But then a diesel bus roared to a stop along the edge of the park just behind them. At the sound of its hissing brakes, he stepped away.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“... he'd felt a joy so delicate it felt invented, some new kind of twenty-first-century joy, so unexpected...”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“I don't need your fucking scone!”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“I could describe it, how I was walking up Trinity that night and saw Victor push her in front of that bus.

Except you didn't see him do that, Olga pointed out, insisting Lena come up to the bookstore to talk this through. You just have a hunch...”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“As Victor had done at every moment of remorse or shame in the past decade, he blamed Lena.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“Olga felt the least capable of being alive when it was overcast.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“...grabbing a woman’s wrist for a second couldn’t implicate a man.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“trauma made a kite of the mind and there was no telling what kind of wind might take hold of it.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew

“She kissed the top of her friend’s head and it felt maternal, sensual—that fragile, erotic overlap that can happen in an embrace between two people who have gradually become essential to one another but have yet to speak of it, and who will likely never speak of all the shoved-down wadded-up things they have come to silently glimpse inside each other.”
― Idra Novey, Those Who Knew