Defenestrate Quotes

“I thought about it a lot afterward. I knew that kissing Morena would’ve been the right kind of fall. Would’ve counted somehow, felt brave at least. But something in me still gripped the safety of the ledge. And I couldn’t loosen my hold.”
― Renee Branum, Defenestrate

“Our speech is so full of falling. It follows us around all day long. We fall down laughing, fall apart, fall away. We fall prey to things. Things fall by the wayside. We fall behind, fall flat on our faces, fall back on things. We fall in line, fall from grace, fall in step, fall in love, fall on our swords. We fall out with our friends. We fall afoul of the law. Our words fall on deaf ears. We fall down dead. We say, "Let matters fall as they may." We say, "Things fall apart.”
― Renee Branum, Defenestrate

“It wouldn’t have to be God, I realize now. That’s only what my mother chooses to call it: this faith you can have in your own life, in the unseen shapes the world sometimes takes, in the stories you tell yourself to gain back trust in your own understanding, in your mind’s cliffs and valleys- the stories you tell yourself to prove that you aren’t so fragile that you can’t continue.”
― Renee Branum, Defenestrate

“Drinking together felt right because it meant that, regardless of what that day or week had been like, we were, at that moment, sharing in the same grief or joy. But I knew there was a lot of drinking that Nick did on his own- or with people I never met. Men he slept with, tourists he met in bars or bookshops. And I felt an odd jealousy, not that he spent his nights elsewhere, but that the booze wasn’t something special or sacred to us, that it took on different patterns for him, granted different permissions.”
― Renee Branum, Defenestrate

“We were our whole world, Nick and I, and there was a kind of splendor in that– contained by each other, two yolks sharing an egg. But there was something in that doubling that made me feel all the more fragile– the two of us poised on a sweet precipice before falling blindly forward into the rest of our lives.”
― Renee Branum, Defenestrate

“His body never held a bruise for very long; the patchwork map of color would fade quickly from his skin, like lamplight spreading outward, shades of ink and violet and rust and egg yolk”
― Renee Branum, Defenestrate

“Perhaps the idea that a life is knowable, mappable, is the real myth.”
― Renee Branum, Defenestrate