Saint X Quotes

“When a person you love dies, the calendar becomes a minefield. Anyone who has lost someone knows this. There is the loved one’s birthday. One’s own Birthday. Various national and religious holidays, if one is religious. All of these days are difficult in their own ways. But the anniversary is different. On the anniversary of the loved one’s death, you slip backward through time to this same day, one, five, ten years ago. You live it all over again, minute by minute.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“She was what all the dead are: whatever the living make them.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“For so long it was all I wanted. The truth! The truth! Good, fine, but for what? With the truth we will do what, become what? And in gaining the truth, what do we lose? It seems to me now that some truths will never be enough to seal the mysteries that precede them. I think in her own way my mother understood this all along—that there is nothing the truth can give you that you cannot give yourself. That in the end, you just have to decide. To live. To continue.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“We don’t know what people look like. We know only what they look like to us. We have an idea of them, shaped by our affections, our memories, and this is the real distortion.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“To mourn a girl with infinite futures was to mourn infinitely.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“For, whether we’re aware of it or not, we are always living in the aftermath of something.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“Here's the thing about women: If the world was only women, there wouldn't be language at all. They don't need it”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“I fooled myself into believing I was after closure, when all I really wanted was never to let go. Because, as Alison’s scar was her most sacred vanity, her death was mine. Because I needed a murder mystery. Without one, what choice did I have but to be angry at Alison for making herself so indispensable to me, to all of us, and then being so careless with herself? (Drinking and drugs, a reckless swim, a stupid accident. The police had suggested this basic scenario from the beginning, but my parents had refused to accept it. Why would they have? Why would anyone accept such a sad and pointless story, a tale that was not even cautionary but simply tragic, a shame?) What choice was there, finally, but to admit that I hated Alison every bit as much as I loved her? I hated her while she was alive for the way her dazzling, spectacular self took up the entire spotlight, and I hated her even more for the oppressive shadow she cast with her death. How could I ever be enough? How could I possibly compare to someone who never had to grow up?”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“Don't you understand? My sister was an innocent, blameless in her horrific fate. And it was all her fault.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“Here's some words of wisdom for you: Don't ever try to out-talk a woman. They store the right language up so it's ready to throw down when the time comes.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“You know how sometimes the world just rips open and you find yourself in a moment that is totally sacred?”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“Alison was an attention whore. She was a gentle soul. She was that girl. The one everybody envied. The one all the boys wanted. A star. She was what all the dead are: whatever the living make them.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“Maybe part of what it means to be eighteen is to feel perpetually caught between the intensity of one’s desires and the dawning self that judges them.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“We see so little of people. We forget how much submerged darkness there is around us at every moment. We forget until we are forced to remember.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“Stories lead us to the truth and they lead us astray, and how are we to know the difference?”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“You want to know the secret of life? You will never be they. They is always someone else.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“Each of our lives is anchored to a single moment, whether disturbing or traumatic or euphoric or inscrutable, from which we never move on, and that the age at which this moment occurs is our Eternal Age”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“People did not forget, but they might decide, eventually, that they no longer cared.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“Do you ever wish something terrible would happen to you so the world could see how strong you are? People probably think I’m this delicate flower because nothing bad has ever touched me, but I’m not. This is fucked up to say, but I think I would be amazing in the face of a tragedy.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“What if you pared yourself down to one essential part? What would that one grain be? It occurred to me that I have no freaking idea.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“I feel like there’s this really slippery slope between being glad you have something and thinking you deserve it.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“So what is gratitude, really, but reverence for a system that gives and deprives at random? No, not at random. The non-randomness is exactly the point, right?”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“It is easy to discern the contours of other people’s pain, much harder to recognize one’s own.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“It's a relief to be on a straightforward beach vacation. No endangered species or ancient city walls to capture.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“He also registers that in a few places at the resort he routinely catches the whiff of certain unmistakable odors. At the far side of the swimming pool, warm garbage. At the turn in the gravel path that leads from their room to the beach, sewage...he still hasn't found paradise, not quite. Because, like everywhere else, when you get down to it, it is all just bodies and their manifold wastes and where to put it all, it is all just disorder two days from taking over.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“My mother could always be counted on to prattle on about something we both knew neither of us carried about.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“These resorts often have an obsession with white. White buildings, white floors, white linens, white uniforms. Like they’re trying to convince you you’ve died and gone to heaven, or like you’ve arrived at some hedonistic sanatorium because you’re afflicted by something and you didn’t even know it but now you will heal.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“Possibilities are everywhere, hidden in the fist of each moment, yet most people don’t see them, or they see them but leave them untouched.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“Whether they realized it or not, these boys were in love with some idea of me as a tragic, wounded girl, that when they looked at me they saw a sort of double exposure—me and the sister I had lost, a second self whose presence they could sense whenever they were with me, and that it was she, not me, they were really after, that as they kissed and licked and squeezed me they were trying to draw themselves closer to her, to touch the infinite, exquisite void of a beautiful, lost girl.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“Nobody likes a snob, but everybody likes the discernment that allows for snobbery.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X