Before the Ruins Quotes

“If I had divided myself into parts—body, brain, heart, soul—I would have been unable to tell you which bit precisely was so exhausted.”
― Victoria Gosling, Before the Ruins

“When we touched each other, it was like we were drawing a map, a map of a place that we never spoke about. I wasn’t sure it was a safe place. There was far too much of me there.”
― Victoria Gosling, Before the Ruins

“was living was an anomaly—a brief comfort-saturated flaring in which the human race burnt through everything it had, like a wild sailor on shore leave—and who wanted to enjoy the moment,”
― Victoria Gosling, Before the Ruins

“He envisioned a Panopticon Penitentiary, a prison built in such a way that the inmates would all be visible from a central watch post, but would be unable to tell if they were being watched. They might be being watched all the time; they might not be watched at all. He believed that even the possibility of being observed would change the behavior of even the most hardened of sinners. He said it was a new mode of obtaining power over people in a quantity ‘hitherto without example.’ But even his ambitions pale into insignificance now.”
― Victoria Gosling, Before the Ruins

“You have to love someone who stands by you like that, even if it isn’t in the right amount—not as much as they deserve, but too much to do what’s right by them. I was going under and I held on to him with a vice-like grip and he took it for love.”
― Victoria Gosling, Before the Ruins

“I preoccupied myself with looking at my hands and willing him to stop. It would have been bad anyway, but being stoned made an agony of it. It was the braying edge his voice took on, his tone both superior and queasily desperate. It was almost as if he was trying to make you hate him, when of course, his intention was the exact opposite.”
― Victoria Gosling, Before the Ruins

“Memory is not an analog photograph that fades. Memory is a house, a castle with many rooms. Some of the rooms are deeper inside, honeycombed away. Each has a thousand keys—an image, a smell, a sound. Behind each door is a thousand other doors.”
― Victoria Gosling, Before the Ruins

“It was like burning the house you live in, when there is a storm raging outside in the middle of winter. Don’t say you haven't wanted to, never had the inkling, the almost-knowledge that everything you love and hold dear is holding you back. Back from what? I was going to find out.”
― Victoria Gosling, Before the Ruins

“Small tasks performed for the betterment of my future self. It was a law I had come to live by: Thou Shalt Not Lay Mines for Thy Future Self! Thou Shalt Not Create Great Piles of Shit for Her to Shovel! But then sometimes it left me feeling like a butler to a cold and demanding stranger: the pension contributions, the long hours at work, the time put in at the gym, the eternal vigilance. Because what about me? What about the me now?”
― Victoria Gosling, Before the Ruins