The World Cannot Give Quotes

“But Laura knows she will do whatever Virginia asks. She no longer remembers how to do anything else.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“So, Laura thinks, this is how it ends: everybody deserves what they get, one way or another. So Virginia was a fraud; so Isobel was a patsy; so Laura’s a fool; so the boys were just coddled, callous idiots who circulated a sex tape of the girl they couldn’t fuck, until poor, stupid Ivan Dixon sent it to Freddy because he couldn’t fuck her, either; so Sebastian Webster wrote a mediocre book and died on the wrong side of history, for no reason but that he was rich, and young, and bored, and the sclerotic modern world was the same then as it is now, and always will be; world without end; and all Webster meant by the rocks and the harbor are one is that in the end you die.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“It’s just that when Isobel says things, Laura believes them, and when Virginia says things Laura believes them, too; it’s just that Laura knows she is so soft, soft enough that anyone can shape her, and she knows enough to know this softness makes her weak.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“Hideous, she thinks suddenly, joyfully. Hideous.

She slices into the crease. She watches, transfixed, as the blood appears. She presses her hand, still trembling, to the wall; she imagines the stone sucking it in, with the moss and the mildew; she imagines it traveling, through the rock and the earth, straight into Sebastian Webster's bones.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“I just want to do the whole thing right. I want to take it seriously."

"But do you—I mean—do you really believe it?"

Virginia snorts. "That's not the right framework," she says. "Believing is all about feeling," she says at last. "Affirming is about deciding. There's a difference.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“The sing it together: My soul doth magnify the Lord, Laura's deep voice and Virginia's light one. The strangeness comes over Laura once again: how two different melodies can become at once single and disparate; something that overflows, as if there is too much of itself for a single note to bear. They go on to And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my savior; then, Laura is no longer Laura, but only a vessel for whatever overflowing thing is passing through her, and the sound is both hers and not hers, and she is and is not part of it, and Virginia's hair smells like candle wax, and Laura thinks, This, this is the sound Robert Lawrence heard; this is the thing that could shipwreck your soul, if you only let it; it is a thing her body can do.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“Laura would have jumped. She knows that now. She will do anything Virginia asks her to. It is a fact beyond assessment or adjudication; it is a law of nature. It’s not her place to have an opinion on it. She will go where Virginia goes. Virginia will tell her what things mean.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“I want you to live in a world, Laura, where things matter. That is the only way I know how to love you.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“She inhales the salt of dawn—if she cranes her neck, she can just about make out the water. She lets the breeze settle on her tongue. She watches the black, stark emptiness of Devonshire Quad, punctuated by those few, furtive figures sneaking between dorms. Light splinters across the sky.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“She wants me to be World-Historical,” Brad says. “She doesn’t care if I’m happy.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“I've been wondering all day," he says. "I can't help but feel responsible in some way. For everything. If somehow—"

"You are. [...] Not only you," Laura says. "Not only anybody." She takes another breath. "But yes. We were."

All of us, she thinks. All of them, knitted together, like their voices, until you can no longer tell what belongs to someone else, and what's your own; all of their wanting, their waiting, their hope, for understanding not yet come.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“I'm sorry," he'd said—she does not remember this part very well—"there's been an accident," as if the only wicked things that happen in the world are the ones that happen by mistake.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“All the things they tell you when you're little, right? Fairy tales, fables, things like that. Cinderella and her prince. Wicked stepsisters with their eyes poked out."

"Yes," says Laura. "I remember."

"And then you grow up—and you realize it isn't like that at all. You do things—good things, bad things, cruel things, and they all just—I don't know—evaporate. Like rain. And you're just supposed to accept it.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“The woods are so different at night. In the morning, on their runs, even the silences feel promising, even before sunrise; the footsteps of chipmunks, the rustling of roots, all incipient with the day to come. But now, the stars studding the sky and the moon bearing down slanting light, the woods are fuller, darker, stranger.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“Laura can't expect Virginia to understand the kind of weak, ordinary human vulnerability that sent Bonnie di Angelis careening over a cliffside with a bottle of vermouth in her hand. The things Virginia feels so deeply are the high, divine things most people don't think about at all; she does not feel the ordinary, kitchen-warming things Laura does.
Laura is almost jealous.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“She messages him about Keats. She messages him about Byron. She messages him about the wild, gasping loneliness that comes from being someone who hungers, really hungers, for all those glorious, vanished things of the world, which in this desiccated day and age have all puttered, like a stopped engine, into mediocrity and decay.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“...She no longer needs to stand next to Ivan to follow with the music. She can shape the notes now, put herself more into the phrases, decide how she wants them to sound. She no longer feels like a vessel, wide open, letting something unthinking pass through. What she sings now is hers.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“Their voices soar and meld together; their voices break apart. Their voices are in the fish St. peter holds; their voices are in the light in Mary's palms; they are in the wood of the pews; they're in the pursed lips of Bonnie and Freddy and Yvette Saunders in the front row; they're in the marble of the floors; they're in Sebastian Webster's powdered bones. Maybe the are, Laura thinks, nothing but their voices, or else maybe their voices are coming from outside them entirely; maybe something great and unenumerable has broken them open, like hazelnut shells, and entered into them; maybe Laura is not Laura at all, any longer, but just the sorry, meaty thing through which their something moves.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“Virginia, she thinks, has never been soft in her life. Whatever Virginia loves, Laura is sure, she loves because she has decided to, through sheer force of will, rather than surrender. [...]

Virginia, Laura knows, would be able to defend Webster, defend Evensong, root her passions in notions solid and firm, in a truth more substantial than the fact that every page of All Before Them makes Laura cry with the joy of being alive.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“You know what your problem is, Laura? [...] You're young. When you're young, you want to make excuses for everyone. [...] The thing about growing up," Isobel says, "is that you learn sometimes, bad people are just bad people. And most people, in the end, are bad people.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“At last, at last Laura understands.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“Laura feels that familiar prickling at the back of her neck, that formless fear that comes over her whenever Virginia goes somewhere Laura cannot follow.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“Laura knows it’s madness. Laura doesn’t care.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“It came to him, at last, Webster writes, the truth he had always known, within himself, unvoiced. He realized—and Laura is convinced that this is the single most beautiful phrase in the English language—the rocks and the harbor are one.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give