Whoever You Are, Honey Quotes

“Mitty had an art teacher once who claimed that there are two kinds of people: those who paint and those who sculpt. It's one thing to look at a blank canvas and imagine a landscape, she said. It's another to look at a mound of clay and see a torso. There are the brains that want to invent, and the brains that want to reveal. Mitty got the sense that her teacher favored sculptors, something about a lack of ego, succumbing to simply uncovering what was already there. She'd noticed that it was the girls in class who chose to work with clay, but it seemed to Mitty that beneath that pattern, there was a darker truth. While the boys felt confident adding to their own creations, the girls were only ever carving away at theirs. This constant process of subtraction until every curve was smooth and wet, the scrap pile tossed into the trash, the little figurine delivered into a hot tomb to bake, all of her perfections preserved.”
― Olivia Gatwood, Whoever You Are, Honey

“It’s so satisfying, she thinks, the minimalism of male toiletries, the fact that men don’t need anything to make themselves more beautiful except time.”
― Olivia Gatwood, Whoever You Are, Honey

“Her voice is deeper than Mitty could have anticipated, the kind of baritone that eventually gets a girl bullied into a forced chirp, until she's hoisting up the ends of her sentences to sound like questions even when they aren't.”
― Olivia Gatwood, Whoever You Are, Honey: A Novel

“The pool was small and deep, a lapping lima bean, and based on Esme's demeanor - tranquil like a lizard on a rock, offering her chin up toward the sky - it seemed she had no intention of jumping in. This was always how it was at other people's houses, Mitty thought. Untouched candy bowls in the foyer, a pantry of unopened Pop-Tarts. The people who had things others didn't never even used them.”
― Olivia Gatwood, Whoever You Are, Honey

“Her voice grows appropriately sober at the pressing threat of wildfires, how the sky was the color of apricots the days after her family's home was spared by a generous wind. But any enchantment with which she describes her young life seems to slip away when she arrives at adulthood. Like notable events stopped happening, her brain no longer gifting her with reality-shifting epiphanies, everything flattened into elongated present. Like she's hardly had any practice telling the story of how she got here, far less proud of what here looks like. While Sebastian's is the origin story of a tycoon, hers amounts to simply living with one.”
― Olivia Gatwood, Whoever You Are, Honey