The World Against Her Skin Quotes

“I haven’t kept a diary since I was thirteen. I stopped then because no matter where I hid the book, my sisters were going to find it, and it was full of the feelings I wasn’t supposed to have. We all knew what we weren’t supposed to feel. Even my sisters were starting to know. But today I’m not so sure. Are any feelings wrong? Was it wrong to feel what I did for Rich Villamano, or just wrong to act on it?”
― John Thorndike, The World Against Her Skin: A Son's Novel

“Jamie slides his chair closer to Miles and puts an arm around his shoulder. The two of them sit side by side, their eyes down and their heads touching. Ginny watches them, looks away, tries not to stare. She thinks about Joe. Did the two of them ever, at a table or in bed or watching a sunset, sit or stand beside each other with their heads lightly touching? For ten seconds? For two? That wasn’t Joe’s way. She wonders how her children ever learned to do this. From the bohemians and hippies, she thinks again. And from the gays, coming out of the closet.”
― John Thorndike, The World Against Her Skin: A Son's Novel

“It’s not drinking that’s strange, it’s sex, because no one can talk about it. Unlike when she was growing up, people now discuss menopause and cancer and death—but sex is still taboo, for her and everyone else. When has she ever talked about her sex with Joe, her sex with Isamu or Rich or Alberto? She steers herself away from even thinking about sex between Jamie and Miles, or sex among the Six. It’s true these days that people are more at ease with their bodies. They talk easily about their heart rate and digestion and the state of their evacuations. But about sex they’re never graphic, and she will be no different. She doesn’t want to spook her sons.”
― John Thorndike, The World Against Her Skin: A Son's Novel

“She’s never been good at meditation, at just sitting. It’s what she likes about her drugs, that they let her drift in slow motion. But she can’t do that any more. Now she can only use her mind to soothe her mind. Quietly she repeats, Om mani padme hum ten times, but it doesn’t help. Of course not, because she’s still in withdrawal.
She wants to be alone in her small, lovely, decrepit wooden house in Sag Harbor. But the house also scares her. It’s filled with drugs and alcohol.”
― John Thorndike, The World Against Her Skin: A Son's Novel

“She has to leave. She has nowhere to go. She imagines tying Rich to a chair, his hands and feet bound and his neck roped. No food, no water, no escape until he tells her everything he’s felt about her for the last four years, the whole truth until she believes him. If he talks and she knows he’s lying, she’ll wrap another coil around his neck, each one tighter than the last. Finally he’ll break down and tell her the bitter truth—that he never loved her at all, that it was only their play that excited him.”
― John Thorndike, The World Against Her Skin