The Truants Quotes

“What is it about an unsolved mystery...that captures us so. that makes us lean forward. looking for an answer? Is it just the challenge of cracking it ourselves or do we rather hope that it will never be solved? Because in solving something, in pinning it down,in reducing it to one reality, something of the magic is lost. Don't we all hope, even the fiercest realists among us, that there is another answer that transcends our understanding? A heaven above us, after all.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“Don't you find the whole minimalist thing so irritating?' she said, ... 'It's for people who care most about things but want to pretend they're not there.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“For the most part, my parents seemed to me neither noticeably happy nor unhappy, but behaved with each other much as many of my friends' parents who behaved: like two adults without much in common who happened to be thrown together on a long car journey. Drawn-out conversations about logistics, silences filled by the welcome distraction of other voices on the radio, and the recurrent niggle that things would be better if they had taken a slightly different route.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“Between five P.M. and six P.M. is what I think of as the Loafing Hour,” Lorna said once as she put the key in her front door and stepped into the hallway, kicking away that day’s post. “When caffeine is no longer a good investment but alcohol not yet a wise one. When anything you’re going to achieve that day has probably already happened and the only sensible thing to do is to sit around, shooting the shit and eating cake.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“....time remembered does not flow smoothly at all. If you are going to imagine sand seeping through an hourglass, then you'd do better to think of it as having grown damp, somehow. Instead of memories trickling through in an orderly fashion, there are long, sticky periods when nothing happens at all, followed by a sudden whoosh in which certain events burst forth in vivid, granular detail.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“There's nothing I love more than watching a river--one of the few places where you actually get to see time carving itself into the landscape. The past flowing into the future.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“... the searing focus and attention they both turned on things, cracking them open, boring down into a core most people don't know exists.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“Since then, I had shut everything down in an effort to be safe, trussed up in my new regimented life. Living in a world in which everything made sense, but meant nothing. A life in which, afraid of the fire, I had put it out altogether.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“Lorna had been a doorway into another world. Alec had, as well. I had followed them, crossing lines, and the world had flared with color.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“And the tears that came then were hot tears that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than the belly, from a bottomless part of the soul, the part we learn not to visit every day, because that would be to cross over to the other side.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“Skidding on loose stones as Lorna drew still farther ahead, I was reminded of those moments in class when her brain seemed to accelerate out of view and she'd glance around the room, surprised to find no one was keeping up with her.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“People leading ordinary lives, eyes turned away from Death, who was waiting, waiting everywhere.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“Tuesday was one of those high spring days that feels like an insult to a crisis.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“Every day, at least a handful of times, I thought of sending Alec a message. Every day I remembered who I wanted to be - the girl who didn't cling - and sat on my hands.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“I had a choice then. That was the moment. But the truth was, I was too caught up in the story of being the girl he wanted, of not being the type who worried and clung. So I swallowed the pain that had balled up in my throat.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“You know when you're in a room, and music comes on - something good - and everyone changes? She was like that. That thing music does to people.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“Which was worse: to follow your heart's desire and risk pain, or to live carefully, considerately, within the rules, telling yourself it was for the best?”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“What had I been doing these months, fantasizing about Alex? Making a hypocrisy of a friendship that was better and more intimate than any I had ever made before - turning my relationship with Nick, which was good and true, into an alibi for something that didn't even exist.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“And the collateral damage that they left in their wake - from heartbroken partners to neglected children and even bloody corpses - all that dissolute, sometimes deranged behavior was vindicated through their art.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“An image of my mother, mouth tight with distaste, flashed into my mind. God, how she'd resist this, resist Lorna, how skeptical she'd be of any attempt to use art as a lens through which to view life. For my mother it was all about the doing. Thinking was a luxury for when you had time on your hands.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“A woman in a long gown who looked like she was on bad terms with her hairbrush came onto the stage...”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“Perhaps I was trying to choke down the disappointment of seeing how well Alec and Georgie worked together - rejection and rebellion make good bedfellows. Perhaps it was the sun and the wine, and the sense that something was blossoming between the four of us. But the spirit of misrule was now in me.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“I liked the way he chose his words. Like he was enjoying running them through his mind first, picking the right ones.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“This wasn't 'killing time,' like it was it was there. In fact, it felt like the opposite. As if, in every exchange, something was growing between us, something that crackled with life.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“Despite it being lunchtime on a weekday, there was that carnival atmosphere that accompanies sunshine in England: people smiling recklessly at strangers, caught in that sweet spot of heightened possibility before things tip over and get ugly.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“For some reason, I found myself thinking about the view of the golf course out of the bay windows at Milton View. How I'd stared at it for eighteen years, yearning for a bigger world to live in, thinking I could find it through books, clawing at make-believe in the hope I'd draw blood. Dear God, I thought with a sudden shiver. Was this the "real world" I'd been trying to find?”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“Perhaps this is what happens, I thought. You spend years trying to climb out of the role your family has you in only to be confused with someone else entirely.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“Masochistically, I wanted to tell him I liked his T-shirt. What is it about beautiful, mean people that makes you want to please them?”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants

“Had I been born with a different nature, I might have called it happy.

But I was too thin-skinned, too alive to the psychological warfare that was rumbling at any given time between my siblings; to the disappointment and half-truths muffled by clashing cutlery and chatter; the dreams struck smartly, one by one, and lost in the rough.”
― Kate Weinberg, The Truants