How It Feels to Float Quotes

Rate this book
Clear rating
How It Feels to Float How It Feels to Float by Helena Fox
20,894 ratings, 3.81 average rating, 2,636 reviews
Open Preview
How It Feels to Float Quotes Showing 1-30 of 38
“Here I am, in borrowed bones, in makeshift skin, looking out it eyes that are a construct, breathing with lungs that are only a step–a basic rearrangement–away from leaves. How funny, to have a body when I am not a body? How funny, to be inside when I am outside.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“I am dead in infinite alternate universes. I am mostly and most likely dead, now, here. All doors opening, all doors closed.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“And it's so clear how far I've fallen. How far I am from where the stars are.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“I'm going to float again. I know it will happen.
This moment will pass. Another one will come. Hard will come—grief and dark and worry and loss. Again. Again. Sooner. Later
There's a chance I'll float out of it for the rest of my life.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“Do you feel better?"
And I've said, "Sometimes."
Which is possibly, almost, don't-look-too-closely-or-it-might-go-away, true.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“The world is full of strange wonders, darling. Maybe you're just lucky enough to see them.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“I think about hearts in bodies and the rhythm inside us we don't get to choose.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“I don’t understand anything and it’s like my sadness has drained my brain and now I can’t learn.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“I smile for the first time in approximately six days, or a month, or ever. Something inside me shifts, opens. It makes way for the possibility of something good.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“Grief feels like this: an okay day and a good day and an okay day then a bad. Bad that follows and empties you. Bad like a sinkhole. ° ° ° ° ° It feels like an unrelenting urge to lay your head down on the table, wherever you are, whomever you are with. ° ° ° ° ° It feels like a night of vivid dreams, and when you wake, all day you hold one dream close because in it everything was back to how it once was.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“I don't know what to say. So I don't say anything, just stare at the text, and this is when I realise I might actually be invisible; maybe I am a ghost and I can't text back because I don't have fingers or a mind that functions and even though I can physically see myself maybe I'm 100 percent a lie.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“All those glances, all the unspoken everythings. I think of all of us, passing each other like turtles, heaving our pasts on our backs.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“The day is already so full my mind is going fuzzy. You know when the input has been so big, the computer starts to fizz and pop? That's how I'm feeling, like my stimulus intake meter has gone into the red. This is more conversation, more newness, more smiling, more Jasper than I've experienced in months. I can feel the blankness swell and turn slowly in my brain, pushing for space. I just have to keep it together enough to not embarrass myself. Just put one word in front of the other Biz; that's all you have to do.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“I can't speak. I feel the pistons of my heart moving, feel my lungs filling, emptying, my pores clogging. I feel the movement of the stars and I can hear the echo of all the black holes consuming everything.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“I think of hearts in bodies and the rhythm inside us we don't get to choose.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“I want to lie inside the black-and-white mess of history. I want to not come out until I know everything.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“Talking has saved me, again and again. It is okay—and you absolutely deserve—to ask for help when things are hard. Remember, lovely human, that you matter very much. You are a miracle of molecules: infinite and extraordinary.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“And it's like when someone touches an electric current and you're holding their hand, so it passes to you, and suddenly there you are: seizing, pulsing, filled with light, unable to let go.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“What do you miss, Jasper? How much do you miss it and in what increments? How large are your lost puzzle pieces? Do you want to find them?”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“And now I am a girl in a stone body,”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“Call me, dear, when you get there.”
I said, “Where?”
And she said, “Everywhere.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“I look at her and see her pieced-together smile, the wobble of her. I see how Mum is made of molecules, how she is only just together.
'Why do you love me?' I ask.
She hiccup-laughs. 'So many reasons,' she says.
She sits beside my bed and lists them.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“Life is terrible and beautiful, isn’t it? It’s the best/worst at the exact same time, all possibilities at once.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“Before I came to this school, I was never in a group, so being in one- especially one with a name- was quite the novelty. It still is, because I mean, I belong to six other people and they say they miss me when I'm not there. I've sat on the bench under the tree by the fence for just over two years now, laughing and saying things I think I'm supposed to. And almost every second of every minute I'm with them, I feel like I'm seeing the scene from somewhere else. In front of a screen maybe, watching someone else's life.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“They say observation affects reality, that it can pin an electron into place. Until then, the electron is just a possibility, just an idea. Until it's seen, it might as well not exist.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“But I know where she's going with this, because she's been surreptitiously texting him all afternoon and she keeps laughing at the things he's written but not saying them to me and it makes me feel like I'm floating, like I'm one of those balloons people let go, even though that balloon is going to fall in the ocean and kill a turtle.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“Life is terrible and beautiful, isn’t it? It’s the best/worst at the exact same time, all possibilities at once.
I guess it’s whatever it is when you observe it.
And a second later it’s something else.
Now it’s something else again.
Now it’s something else.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“Truth and truth split in two and walk side by side.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“Maybe I’m turning petrified, like the wood you find under earth, buried so long it’s turned into rock.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float
“I am dead in infinite alternate universes. I am mostly and most likely dead. I am dead, now, here. All doors opening, all doors closed.”
Helena Fox, How It Feels to Float

« previous 1