Very Cold People Quotes

“One day my mother asked me what color my eyes were, The bank teller had just said something about a cat's green eyes, and my mother had immediately said that her eyes were green, too. A cat's eyes were green; her eyes were green; what color were my eyes? If they were green, too, then the teller might congratulate my mother on having guessed right. She had no idea that a normal person would find it insane for a mother to ask her only child what color her eyes were. But I sensed that she was also trying to see what it would be like to be that unattached to me. She was practicing, to see what it would be like to hurt me, a lot, to show how much she loved me. She had to be careful. If anyone found out that she loved me, we'd both be in trouble.
For a while I'd have to suffer, out in the open, the only girl without extra sneakers for gym class, but it was only because my mother's love was so much greater than all the other loves.
It was that much more dangerous, so she had to love me in secret, absolutely unobserved by anyone, especially me.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“My life felt unreal and I felt half-invested. I felt indistinct, like someone else's dream.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“I thought I'd die of it, but I didn't die. You can learn to eat violence. There is pleasure in not resisting. I dedicated myself to teaching my bully just how much a person can consume.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“On winter mornings the light spread like a watery broth over the landscape.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“She died by her own hand, but she was as brave as a soldier before a firing squad. She faced it. Whatever it was, she had been facing it for a long time.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“I like to visit with the exhausted girl who once was me”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“In fourth grade we played hard. The fifth-grade girls played four square, too, but they didn't jeer at each other when they played, and they hit the ball gently from square to square.
Their slowness seemed deliberate, as if they were dancing. Their skirts brushed slowly against their knees as they swayed. It wasn't so much that they looked different; they just looked as if they knew they were being watched.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“Some people wore their difference honestly, but my parents were liars, illegitimate Waitsfielders, their off-whiteness discovered only after the paint had dried. By the time I was born, the house had faded to the color of dirty snow.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“She’d believed his praise was genuine. She hadn’t noticed that he’d pegged her as a person who would snatch up any compliment into the maw of her unloved, throbbing little heart.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“I asked my parents to buy me a Lite Brite like the one I played with in school, and they did. It was the only toy I had that plugged in, that was bought new... I couldn't reconcile it with the other things in my room and in our house, and I can'r remember every playing with it. It was mine, but I didn't feel worthy of using it. It wasn't my turn to use it yet, not when it was still brand-new.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“Weak men who fall into positions of power are dying to give it up to anyone who will take it. The poor player would throw the ball to someone on the other team just to be rid of the worry of what to do with it, of the dread that he would have to be a man of action for a moment.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“My life felt unreal and I felt half-invested. I felt indistinct, like someone else’s dream.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“We didn’t display any photographs of ourselves, even on the refrigerator. My friends’ houses had photographs of themselves on the walls and on the refrigerators, and I wondered why we didn’t, but I also understood that George Washington was more important than anyone in my family.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“I liked to buy candy at the drugstore and walk across the street to the cemetery of the Congregational church, where three-hundred-year-old babies lay in the earth beside their aged parents. I chewed a spice drop and thought about the dead people.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“We ate icicles not because they tasted good but because they were a primal thing that could not be bought.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“We were inert targets at which to aim their certainty, and even if we knew they were wrong, the men couldn't even imagine not being right. So many of them would never know what was actually true.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“People who live that long aren't impulsive. They protect a little ember and say just a little bit too cold all their lives.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“I had no character to speak of, no loyalty to anything. I made fun of anyone, given the chance, just as my parents did at home, talking about me, talking about their closest friends.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“What's curious to me now is that I didn't know at the time that I was suffering, so deeply involved was I in being saved.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“My own girlhood felt like something from 1650 even when it was happening. The little parties, kindnesses done by friends, the light as I walked home from school. Pine needles. I spent those days feeling half-there, not quite committed to that life.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“Weak men who fall into positions of power are dying to give it up to anyone who will take it.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“The background of my life was white and angry, with violent weather.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People