Valencia and Valentine Quotes

“Do you know how much of my life I spent waiting for something terrible to happen? I was obsessed with it, consumed by it I spent every moment dreading it--and all of a sudden, here it was, and it was every bit as awful as I'd imagined it would be And then . . . life went on. I realized then how pointless and powerless fear is . . . .”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“She didn’t have enough friends to be a bad one herself.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“A song can be sad and beautiful at the same time. Life too.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“Grace was the irrational one, but maybe irrational thought was the key to sanity. Maybe you had to choose one or the other.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“She was not—had never been—the kind of person who needed constant, stupid amounts of attention, but everyone needed a little of it.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“Everything should resolve. Maybe art was people’s way of making up for life, which never resolved.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“I winked back, because I didn’t know what else to do. It felt very strange. I decided not to wink at anyone ever again.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“People always enjoy their own ideas more than yours.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“She didn’t want him to think she was rude and realized she should say something, like someone who wasn’t rude would. Like a normal person would. Was this terribly deceitful of her, to pretend to be normal? She tried to think of what polite, normal people said. What do normal people say? What do I say normally? Do I normally say things?”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“But in real life you go around thinking that everything good is going to last forever, and it takes you by surprise when it doesn’t. And when you suddenly realize that it has happened for the last time, it’s too late.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“Time had never done anything but crawl for Valencia; it had never even walked before (she had, at points, wondered if it had lain down and died).”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“Everyone has ulterior motives. When an evil person has ulterior motives, it’s called scheming. When a good person has ulterior motives, it’s called planning. Mrs. Valentine is planning.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“Mrs. Valentine tries to find joy in little things, since most of the bigger things are getting too heavy and slippery for her to hold on to.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“Debt: the meaning of life—not just her life, everyone’s. Accumulating it and then paying it off—or, in the case of some religions, working it off, and in others, having someone else pay it off for you. It was all about debt.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“Debt: the meaning of life—not just her life, everyone’s. Accumulating it and then paying it off—or, in the case of some religions, working it off, and in others, having someone else pay it off for you.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“She has a recording of a favorite piano piece that she lets play on repeat day and night—Rachmaninoff’s Étude-Tableau in G Minor.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“He didn’t understand that her compulsions were not cute, that they consumed her.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“Now she was just alone, and being alone after not being alone was much worse than being alone before not being alone.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“This was a problem she kept encountering as she got to know people—they kept wanting to know her back.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“Was it possible to get so tense that your body wouldn’t be able to take any more air in? Could she suffocate trying to relax?”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“The combination of caffeine and conversation could actually be the death of her.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“(That’s how it is when you’re in your thirties; birthdays aren’t important anymore because everyone has gotten over the initial excitement of your basic existence. You’re old news. But there’s this nostalgic part of you that still remembers—maybe longs for—a time when people were excited.)”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“It feels eccentric, but this makes her happy—someone once told her that eccentric people live longer than everyone else.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“When you are old, you realize that rules about this kind of thing are ridiculous. You can be relatives with whomever you want. Blood is irrelevant.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“She’d always cared too much about the opinions of others. She had considered that this aching need to be liked made people like her less, that it would be stifling and repulsive to those she came in contact with, so she tried not to care so much—like a drowning person trying not to swallow so much water, as though trying would override the body’s natural instinct to gasp for air. It was a cycle that left her lungs full of water they couldn’t use and unable to take anything good in.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“Sometimes she feels like she’s two people in one: a stubborn child and its harried mother.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“What good is going anywhere if you can’t find joy in staying still first, right?”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“The same way you’d get wrinkles on your face from making the same facial expression over and over, she thought, you could probably get wrinkles on your brain from thinking the same thoughts and feeling the same feelings over and over.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“This was a drastic leap in logic, but Valencia was very good at this kind of leaping; it was her only claim to athleticism.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine

“Maybe the simple act of being alive doesn’t seem all that important until it stops feeling involuntary and starts feeling like something you have to work at.”
― Suzy Krause, Valencia and Valentine