The Five Wounds Quotes

“This is death, then: a brief spot of light on earth extinguished, a rippling point of energy swept clear. A kiss, a song, the warm circle of a stranger’s arms—these things and others—the whole crush of memory and hope, the constant babble of the mind, everything that composes a person—gone.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“Real suffering isn’t just about physical pain, but about not knowing when the pain will end, not knowing what the point of it all is.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“There was never any question in Angel’s mind that she would forgive her teacher. She expected, after all, that people would mistreat her—that people in general mistreat other people—and though she minded, really, really minded, what she wanted was the time after, when they could be closer for it.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“What no one appreciates is that it takes courage—and considerable dramatic flair—to show up and insist you belong, to invoke genetic claims and demand food and love and housing.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“This is death, then: a brief spot of life on earth extinguished, a rippling point of energy swept clear.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“Why does she do this? Rankle against her father, resent him for not caring, for never being who she wants him to be — and then when he does do something kind and fatherly, something that another, better father would do for another, better daughter, her happiness is too bountiful to bear, the pleasure intolerable. She must thrust it away from her, must rush through the moment.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“there is no way things should be, only the way things are, and the way things are is going to keep changing.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“Having children is terrifying, the way they become adults and go out into the world with cars and functioning reproductive systems and credit cards, the way, before they’ve developed any sense or fear, they are equipped to make adult-sized mistakes with adult-sized consequences.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“Here’s what she doesn’t want to think about: her grandmother’s death has brought—horribly, undeniably—relief. She’d been warned that this would be the case, by the hospice aide and the doctor, but the warnings don’t make her feel any less shitty.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“Watching her mother with her son, Angel felt compassion that vexed her, because she doesn’t owe her mother anything—compassion least of all. Is this what motherhood means? Being suddenly able to pity the adults in your life?”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“Angel had sort of believed that death—the death of someone essential and life-defining—meant the end of everything, but here she is, mashing banana with a fork, loading the dishwasher. Here she is (having placed Connor in his pen), doing something as mundane and necessary as choosing from among the bottles lined up along the edge of the bathtub and shampooing her hair. This heartache is so much larger than anything she’s felt. It’s agony—she can’t sit still, it hurts so much—and also enlivening. Angel had no idea that the world could hold ache like this, just as, before Connor was born, she had no idea it could hold such love.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“This baby: such a massive force with so little actual personality”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“To feel a little of what Christ felt, Tío Tíve said over a year ago. And what Christ felt was love. Amadeo doesn't know how he lost track of this. Love: both gift and challenge.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“For now, she is herself and not herself—stick-limbed, gray-skinned, the curiosity in her eyes receding, her voice both high and gravelly—an unwelcome version of herself that he nonetheless clings to. When she slips into light, permeable sleep, he can’t stop checking on her, longing for her to jolt awake and reassure him.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“the fact is that she’s ashamed of Amadeo, because he hasn’t been to college, doesn’t have a job, and that even as she’s imagining a future for them, she isn’t sure this is the future she wants, but she still wants him.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“When he needs to unwind, sink away from himself, or to celebrate, he remembers that he’s closest to being the person he wants to be than he has ever been before.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“Yolanda grew weary of the responsibility. Anthony wasn’t her flesh, yet he demanded the same constant supervision that even her children had begun to grow out of. He was like a child, but without the sweetness and vulnerability that enchanted her in Valerie and Amadeo.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“It had chilled Yolanda to realize that her instincts were so blunted, that she’d been so susceptible to that charm.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“But you need to make a commitment to yourself that when the people around you let you down, you will not believer you are a person who deserves to be let down, that you will not in turn let yourself down”
― Kristin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“As Amadeo speaks the words along with the other men, he pities his old self, the self that once believed there was a single, big thing he could do to make up for all his failings. He missed the point. The procession isn’t about punishment or shame. It is about needing to take on the pain of loved ones. To take on that pain, first you have to see it. And see how you inflict it.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“Crowding every surface are canisters of butt wipes and lint-covered pacifiers and board books that Angel insists on reading to his unresponsive form, to, she says grandly, “promote early literacy.” Then she follows up with viciousness: “Not that you cared about my early literacy.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“let alone lifting him. He’s not a beautiful baby, despite what they all keep telling him and each other. Connor Justin Padilla has patchy long dark hair over a peeling, crusted yellow scalp (“crib crap,” Angel pronounces with authority), cheeks so full they squish his lips, and an oddly dented skull that narrows at the top. His unnervingly large black eyes make him look like some nocturnal woodland creature, except that they’re unfocused and slightly crossed. Two weeks old, and he already has a little mustache, heavy eyebrows, a furry forehead. His grandson is a manimal, thinks Amadeo.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“dim afternoon light slants through the thick pane of the window. They feel clean and warm—she is sure she is feeling for both of them—swaddled by this hospital, with the nurses just outside the door, ready to make sure they’re okay. She could stay here forever, lying on these fresh sheets, looking out the window at the wide blue sky. This person was in her, part of her, and now he’s not. He was once hers alone, and now, for the rest of her life, she’ll be sharing him with the world. It’s amazing to her how the human body can stretch, and she thinks that if the heart can, too, maybe it can stretch big enough to fit them all.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“Angel is so happy. She never knew she could be so happy. Lying here against these pillows, Connor bundled to her chest, the body heat passes between them, indistinguishable. The”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“Poor Anthony, a kid crushed under longing he didn’t know what to do with, in the claustrophobia of those times and this village, of the church and his parents’ home, suffering from the loss of the first boy he’d ever loved. No wonder he sought every escape he could; no wonder he turned his desire from gold into straw, transformed it into an open-mawed chemical hunger that devoured them all.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“kind directness, has so rarely ever even seen them in”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“As Amadeo speaks the words along with the other men, he pities his old self, the self that once believed there was a single, big thing he could do to make up for all his failings. He missed the point. The procession isn't about punishment or shame. It is about needing to take on the pain of loved ones. To take on that pain, first you have to see it. And see how you inflict it.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“Now the thought occurs to him, as though it was original, that there is no way things should be, only the way things are,”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“Trotting along his life will run a ghost life, a life in which Connor is killed on this night.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“Now the thought occurs to him, as though it was original, that there is no way things should be, only the way things are, and the way things are is going to keep changing.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds