Unspeakable Things Quotes

“He watched a lot of TV. I guess many people did. Maybe like him, they preferred their lives delivered to them in a box.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“The trick of life,” she said, “is that you can’t hold the pain for too long. The magic, either.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“I’d been thirteen, not stupid, though a lot of people confuse the two.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“I heard the distaste in her voice, the disdain for people who lived in trailers. She wouldn’t say it out loud, but there it was. I wanted to ask her what she thought of people who lived in houses with scary drunks, but I didn’t. Those sorts of questions only made her angry.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“He wore his anger like knives, and you didn’t want them aimed at you.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“Small-town kids are pebbles in a river, pushed around by the flow, forming pockets and piles, reforming when the current picks up and we find ourselves in a whole new cluster.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“I let the fireflies lead the way, dancing just ahead of me, sparkling as I passed and then dimming to nothing.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“All this time I’d thought of Aunt Jin as a hero. Well, here’s something you should know: heroes are willing to pause their own lives to help you. Jin wasn’t that. She was a regular person.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“Well, here’s something you should know: heroes are willing to pause their own lives to help you.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“There’s about a hundred shades of green in a Minnesota summer, light like celery, deep like emeralds. You wouldn’t think one color could have so many different flavors.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“Evie had swallowed that like it belonged to her and went right back to whatever she was working on. Then, later that day, I was walking behind her as she told a fifth grader in outdated bell-bottoms that he wore them with “a flair and a flourish” all his own. I liked that a whole lot about Evie, how she passed on her treasures.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“I’d go with him. We’d be old enough. We’d make a whole new life together, a normal one. Ever since that bus ride, I’d been carrying my love for him around in my pocket. I should have handed it to him then and there in exchange for the gloves, but the briars and brickles of shame had been too sharp. By the time they receded, it felt stupid to bring it up. Then that faded, and all I could do was wait for an opening, some situation where he and I were hanging out and shooting love darts at each other. When it arrived, I’d say, all joshing, Hey, you remember when you thought I needed gloves? Yeah, he’d laugh. I’ve wanted to give you my paper airplane necklace ever since. And our relationship would bloom from there. Every day, I looked for this opening. It could be tomorrow. “Time to go,” Dad said, finally. His face was glistening. Me and Sephie’s pops and quarters were long gone and our stomachs were growling. We’d been sitting near the door, wishing Dad would take the hint and leave, but he’d kept up at that hot conversation with Bauer. We followed him outside. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” Dad said when we finally slid inside the van, his voice full of bravado. Except I could tell he was scared. Mom wasn’t going to be happy that we were out so late on a school night and that Dad was driving drunk, but that wasn’t it. No, he looked jumping-ghost scared, and that made me uneasy. It did even worse to Sephie. It must have. That’s the only explanation for why she broke the rule about inviting conversation with Dad when he’d been drinking. “Are you okay, Daddy?” She hardly ever called him that anymore. I didn’t think he was going to respond, but he finally did, his voice all bluster. “As okay as a man can be in a country where nothing’s sacred.” I wondered what he meant. He and Bauer had talked about so many things. Well, I wasn’t going to”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“I knew him from one of my dad’s parties, knew him better than I wanted to.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“His accent was coarse, pure backcountry Minnesotan. If he had to string together more than five words, we’d hear the “I seen it” and “can you borrow me some” that my parents said were the signs of ignorance”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“Over in ’Nam I realized the only god is the sun coming up one more day. I swore if I survived, I’d never take another sunrise for granted.” That started out okay, he said, but then there were only so many kinds of sunrises after a while, and they all started to look the same. So no worshipping anything at our house.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“The smell was a predatory cave stink, the suffocating funk of a great somnolent monster that was all mouth and hunger. It had canning jars for teeth, a single string hanging off a light bulb its uvula. It waited placidly, eternally, for country kids to stumble down its backbone stairs.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“It reminded me I could go anywhere when I got older, explore bottomless blue-green oceans, climb icy snow-capped mountains, drink tea with monks.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“I’m having a birthday party. Do you want to come?” Evie glanced at the invitation. “Thanks, but no.” She didn’t use any excuses, just said it simple and straight, handing my humiliation right back to me, thanks but no thanks.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“my heartbeat woke me with its thudding cry of look look look.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“My eyes were scratchy with middle-sleep.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“I need to teach you the trick.” He didn’t say it creepy. I could smell the liquor pouring off him in waves, but he wasn’t hunting me, not right at this moment. I took a deeper breath. “What trick?” He sat up straighter, garbling his words. “Whenever you can’t sleep, take five deep breaths, pulling them all the way into your toes and holding them until you can’t stand it. Then you stretch everything, even your little finger. Even the hair in your ears.” I smiled at this, though he wasn’t looking at me. That was something he used to say to us when we were younger. I love even the hair in your ears. Eww! We’d say. It’s full of wax! I still love it because I love you. “Then hold your eyes halfway closed to the count of twenty-five, then all the way closed to the count of one hundred. Think you can do that?” A big tear globe was swelling up in my right eye. I nodded. “Good,” Dad said. He pushed himself off the ground but started to tip. He got it on his second try. “You don’t need me, then. I think I’ll go for a walk.” He pointed toward the basement door. “Don’t go in there. Basements are where men hide their secrets.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“He said the government was always listening and that anything you had to say you should say in person.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“In some versions of the story, the boy had been tortured, made to drink the blood of his captors, and forced to walk home naked. Except no one seemed to have a name to go with their stories. Who had been attacked?”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“If you divorced him, we’d have more money. He doesn’t hardly sell any sculptures. He eats and drinks a lot. Mostly you pay the bills.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“like him, they preferred their lives delivered to them in a box.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“Small-town kids are pebbles in a river”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“Should have thought of that before you paraded your bodies in front of me in those dresses. But yeah, I suppose it is gross,”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“I joined in because what the heck.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“I wrinkled my nose. He was really going to town on that massage.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“That’s the thing about small-town boys. All they had to do was come up with that one shtick, a crack at just the right time, or a Hail Mary touchdown, or nail the part of Romeo in the class play, and they were set. They never had to try again. Here’s the thing about small-town girls: we let them get away with it. But not now. I didn’t have time for it.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things