Devotion Quotes

“It’s girls who hide objects inside other objects—jewelry boxes, hope chests, dollhouses, decorative compacts with mirrors inside, boxes of love notes, tampons.”
― Madeline Stevens, Devotion

“There is something engrossing in watching a beautiful woman eat ferociously—wolflike—salami grease and peach juice on her chin.”
― Madeline Stevens, Devotion

“She said she's been dealing with a crushing nostalgia, running over these same places again and again, unable to accept the fact that the past is over. She said she felt like curling up in bed in the morning, in the dark, closing the blinds, longing for a dreamless sleep. A dark space of nothing. Because the something is sad, no matter what it is. It's sad because it ends. Beauty is pain because it is not eternal.”
― Madeline Stevens, Devotion

“acostarte por un rato a lado de una persona hace que se sienta más cercana a ti, aun cuando no aprendas nada nuevo de ella.”
― Madeline Stevens, Devotion

“Cada día es como el anterior hasta que deja de serlo. Porque nada pasa jamás. Y cuando algo ocurre parece ser lo único que hubiera ocurrido.”
― Madeline Stevens, Devotion

“I read once that a woman can carry around DNA from the men who’ve ejaculated inside her for the rest of her life. They cut open a bunch of dead women’s brains and found male DNA, which at first they thought was from pregnancy, but later they realized it was in too many women, not just ones with sons. The sperm, they reasoned, are basically moving DNA, and they don’t just burrow into available eggs but any cells they can find. I didn’t want to house his genetic code. What did it do inside you? Why was he making me carry it?”
― Madeline Stevens, Devotion

“We can only understand ‘now’ in relation to ‘then,’ so we can never really understand time.”
― Madeline Stevens, Devotion

“This wasn’t true, and I don’t know why I said it. I’d never lacked for friends, growing up, and had related deeply to a number of different girls. We’d had forts and imaginary worlds, secret pacts and boxes full of notes about the minutiae of our lives, dropped into lockers, just like Lonnie. Each of these relationships had ended abruptly, each for its own unimportant reason, and then we had gone our separate ways.”
― Madeline Stevens, Devotion

“I’VE ALWAYS WATCHED A LOT OF HORROR MOVIES. AS A KID I’D liked them simply because they were forbidden. Though they gave me nightmares, I watched anyway, just to feel like I was getting away with something.”
― Madeline Stevens, Devotion