Favourite Quotes From the Last Five Books I Read

“I’m a speckled seal swimming past the breakers, a seabird with a wingspan so long I can fly for miles. I’m the new moon, hidden and safe from him, from everyone.”

“I wonder how much victimhood they’d be willing to grant a girl like me.”

“Sometimes it feels like that’s all I’m doing every time I reach out—trying to haunt, to drag him back in time, asking him to tell me again what happened. Make me understand it once and for all. Because I’m still stuck here. I can’t move on.”

“Grief is tricky like that. It can lie low for hours, long enough for magical thinking to take hold. Then, when you’re good and vulnerable, it will leap out at you like a fun-house skeleton, and all the pain you thought was gone comes roaring back.”

“[…] perception is a tricky thing. When people think of you a certain way, it’s almost impossible to put that genie back in the bottle. And when the world considers someone a monster, people treat them like one, and it isn’t long before that person starts to believe it as well.”

“He’s like a perfect, windless pond, her husband once said. You throw something in just to watch it sink, and you’re going to see it on the bottom staring back at you for the rest of your life.”

“It’s marvelous to know another person’s entire literary canon by heart. It’s like knowing their secret personal language.”

“Now a hunger that cannot quite be located in the body comes over her, a sense of yearning, for what? Maybe for kindness, for a moral sense that is clear and loud and greater than she is, something that can blanket her, no, no, something in which she can hide for a minute and be safe.”

“After all, a person is herself, and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one’s being. I am me, and you.”

“Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default. Tell them there is a standard for acceptance; that standard is simply perfection. Kill those who scoff at those contradictions, and tell the rest that the dead deserved annihilation for their weakness and doubt. Then they’ll break themselves trying for what they’ll never achieve.”

“It’s a gift if it makes us better. It’s a curse if we let it destroy us.”

“Even on this most terrible days, even when the worst of us are all we can think of, I am proud to be a human.”

“You can only do so much pretending before you become the thing you’re pretending to be.”

“When you’re faced with something you don’t understand, I think the most natural thing but also the least interesting thing you can be is afraid.”