"“And she called me crying over medical bills,” Pam continued. “Harper, she’ll tell you. It’s changing everything for her too.”
That language again. In Harper’s experience, nothing changed anything, much less everything.""
"[i]n high school she was known only as the most ferocious striker on the field hockey team, once backswinging her stick in an opposing player’s throat with such ferocity, the girl vomited. After that, everyone had to wear neck guards, which they all called Beckys in her honor."
"Harper didn’t know what to say. She knew Pam loved them both. But there was part of them she could never fold into her understanding of life, or of them. It was a limitation. Everyone had them."
"Ivy's voice was high-pitched, anxious, the way it sounded when she talked about her mother."
"Jane’s mind spun in slow motion, trying to slough off the lingering hangover and assemble Ivy’s sentences in an order that led to a different outcome."
"Jane had learned that when Wade brought up his dad it was best to remain quiet or risk a “You have no idea what it was like!” speech."
"‘This guy is gonna turn out like my Aunt Peg’s lasagna—looks great but dig in and, whoa, Nelly, what the fuck is going on here? It’s all fake.’"
"Orla had never not known she would move to New York. That was where authors grew, and she would be an author. She thought, when she walked into a bookstore as a kid, that the novels on the shelves had been emitted, nearly automatically, by the grown- up iterations of each American high school’s best writer."
"Orla began the strenuous mental exercise of trying to come up with a restaurant that was inexpensive, close enough to walk to, and stocked with normal bread baskets, not focaccia or olive loaf or anything that might make her mother say, derisively, “Ooh la la.” Ten minutes later: “Ooh la la,” Gayle said as the waitress set down the bread basket. Orla sighed. “But it’s just rolls.” Gayle pointed at the dish next to the basket, which, instead of wrapped pats of butter, held a pool of oil and herbs for dipping."
"More than anything else— to be an author, to have a boyfriend, to learn how it felt to breathe without being forty thousand dollars in debt— she wanted the answer to the question. She was living in the before of something, and she was getting tired of it. The dangerous thing about the way she felt, Orla knew, was that she didn’t know exactly what she wanted to happen, and she didn’t care that she didn’t know. Almost any change would do."
"The events of our lives unfold linearly, but in the mental reel of these past experiences, most of the frames that haven’t been completely stolen by time are left distorted and blurred by it. When you try to reconstruct the series, you find that it isn’t complete, but maybe this never really bothers you, because you can’t miss what you don’t remember."
"Our lives are so short that it seems a crime to squander any of it by forgetting. Memories extend our lives backward through time, making them feel longer. And that’s what we want. So we try to remember. But sometimes, when we do, we wish that we could just forget again."
"She liked stories, particularly those that were dark and off-putting. She wanted to gaze at them directly, to hold them in her palms."
“Now you’re dead, trapped in the underworld. You feel empty, stuck. And you know what? It’s actually the most powerful place to be. You need only reach out to the pain and grab it, use it. But if you don’t?” Her expression turned mournful. “Well, then you stay dead."
"Clio’s anger was now like a fourth member of their family, to be considered, managed and placated at all times."
"A year after Isla’s death, still not an hour goes by when Abby is not arrested by grief so strong it physically winds her. A sense of loss so profound it is as though an ancient god has scooped out her heart and is feeding it to birds of prey."
"One of them, approximately forty years old, dressed in a grey summer suit, was short, dark-haired, plump, bald, and carried his respectable fedora hat in his hand. His neatly shaven face was adorned with black horn-rimmed glasses of a supernatural size."
"Berlioz was gripped by fear, groundless, yet so strong that he wanted to flee the Ponds at once without looking back."
"‘Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he’s sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there’s the trick! And generally he’s unable to say what he’s going to do this same evening.’"
"Ratslayer was a head taller than the tallest soldier of the legion and so broad in the shoulders that he completely blocked out the still-low sun."
"He waited for some time, knowing that no power could silence the crowd before it exhaled all that was pent up in it and fell silent of itself."
"‘And where are your things, Professor?’ Berlioz asked insinuatingly. ‘At the Metropol?1 Where are you staying?’
‘I? . . . Nowhere,’ the half-witted German answered, his green eye wandering in wild anguish over the Patriarch’s Ponds.
‘How’s that? But . . . where are you going to live?’
‘In your apartment,’ the madman suddenly said brashly, and winked."
"Luxury is a type of meta-diversion designed to help us forget about all the things we had to do in order to obtain it in the first place."
"Arguing with someone you love is a form of hubris—a kind of baseless, arrogant confidence that you have so much control over your future and so much time ahead of you that you can afford to squander an entire day of emotional connection, or an hour, or even one goddamn minute."
"Randomness is usually more the result of our inability to see patterns than the actual absence of them."
"But every once in a while, when the world is expecting you to zig, the best move you have is to zag."
"Is refusing to tell the truth different from lying? Most would tell you it is."
"You can’t patch up a parent’s pain no matter how badly you want to, and if you absorb too much of it, you’ll drown alongside them."
"Part of being sixteen is laughing at things that hurt. Hell, it might be the most important part."
"Weller was a senior and star linebacker at Bloomington South and I was a mediocre junior golfer at Bloomington North—not exactly a shared social circle—but party invitations in Bloomington were more like a virus than a formality—you could acquire one with many degrees of separation from the source."
"We pored over AIM exchanges with girls as if we were working with Alan Turing on cracking the Enigma code."
"Our brains don’t allow us to press ahead without paying the toll of memory and making at least a short trip into the past. You can’t drive to your next meeting if you don’t remember where you parked your car. Can’t remember where you parked it if you don’t remember what kind of car it is. It’s all simple until it’s impossible."
"In the old days, the public didn't really mind so much about accuracy. But nowadays, readers take it upon themselves to write to authors on every possible occasion pointing out flaws."
"Emily looked at him like she no longer spoke his language. This meeting had gone somewhere she hadn't thought it could get to. It had flown free of her grasp, when she didn't know it had wings."
"There was, in sum, an atmosphere of wistful secrecy surrounding her—she was a woman about whom one longed to know more—and it was said by nearly all who knew her that she possessed an unusual quality of happiness—not that she herself was happy, which I now doubt; rather, that her presence had the power to arouse positive feelings in others. It was her special gift, one I can attest to."
"Time itself has weight. It bears upon the mind—every joy, every regret, every minute of every day adding to the total—until the system by which we sort and file the data (I like chocolate; it’s Wednesday; my ward is named Proctor; my wife, Cynthia, tied an anchor to her ankle and threw herself into the sea) collapses in a cascade of confusion."
"For my father, reality’s gentle rain has become a bombardment."
"So overwhelming was his sense of her, it was as if he’d traveled backward in time."
"guidelines for arrival
This document has been introduced into your environment to assist you in the days ahead. Soon you may begin to notice changes in yourself and in the world around you. These may include:
Meteorological disturbances, such as sudden storms
Feelings of disorientation or panic
Disruption to sleep patterns
Memories that do not seem real
Feelings of déjà vu
Coincidences
Hallucinations
A sensation of intense cold that passes quickly
Changes in the night sky, such as the appearance of unfamiliar celestial bodies
DO NOT BE ALARMED.
DO NOT SEEK MEDICAL INTERVENTION.
FURTHER GUIDELINES WILL BE ISSUED AT A LATER DATE."
"Anything worth doing is worth doing partially."
"Be careful you don’t confuse evil with despair. One reason tragedy exists is to teach us how to help others, help others learn how to find a way through their own dark time, through a journey of growth."
"He’d been quiet, reclusive. David had always thought of him as distant and, quite frankly, strange. Consciously or unconsciously, he’d kept a wide berth of the boy, as had most of the others. A wallflower, yeah, but poisonous to the touch."
"I didn’t like how she changed with Leo around, how all her gestures were stretched out of size with a touch of performance. I didn’t like how deferential she was with him, but also charged somehow, confident she could draw his attention if she wanted it."
"Winters were especially confining. We were all tied—as if by rope—to that sooty black furnace. Which has a certain romance, I know, if you tell the story right, a certain Victorian ghost-story earnestness people like, and I’ve told the story that way to the delight of shark-tooth-wearing dates in coffee shops."
"I found it difficult to imagine that slippered, thin man leaving such a mark. He seemed insubstantial to me—though stubborn, maybe, like a stain."
"The wall of the anteroom is painted in a municipal nicotine-peach and I rest my head against it, confident that I won’t dirty it or make it worse."
"There is a hollowness inside me, a change – a before and an after. The person I was with her and the person I am without her.
‘Not real, is it?’ he asks me, getting the bottle back out again.
I want to tell him that it is, that it feels so real my heart is on fire, that my insides have disappeared and I can’t feel anything from the lungs down except a vast empty pressure. It’s far too real to me. ‘It’s like a dream,’ I tell him, for the sake of saying something. ‘A nightmare.’"
"No one came to our house except the man my mum worked for in her office, who went to the same church as her and liked to talk about the day God first spoke to him as a shaft of light through their canteen window. I always wanted to tell him it was just a shaft of light through a canteen window. I was too young to know that the sun can feel divine when you need a god that badly."
"My suitcases can stay in the car for now: I need to walk to the sea’s edge, to remember how the land ends, peters away against the persistence of the water. I need to see the curve of the Earth on the horizon."
"Ann never gets tired of weddings. She sees that kiss, watches the bride’s face, the groom’s hands as he lifts the veil: the instant described by the church as a sacrament, flesh bound to flesh, as mysterious as bread becoming the body of Christ. Not that Ann actually believes in it all. Ann loves Carl, but their flesh is not one. Carl would have a nervous breakdown at the very thought that Ann’s self-polluting appetites might be attached to his body."
"Back then, she shrugged off his concern, refused to pick out a calcium tablet and put the one he chose back on the shelf. But the question stayed with her, repeating itself in her head. She couldn’t imagine any reason that he would ask other than a sincere concern for her health. Even her father, who hoarded thousands of doses of aspirin, enough to ensure against a headache or fever into the next millennium, never suggested she take a vitamin. No one, Ann included, had ever expressed interest in her durability. That question, “Are you taking calcium?” was for her Carl’s proposal."
"Ann doesn’t feel as reckless as her behavior implies—she worries that Carl would leave her if he knew what she’s been up to, and she is always saying goodbye to her vices, always in the midst of what she would call a final indulgence."
"Does anyone go through life the way I do? Stopping to pick up a scrap of paper on the street, to read a note dropped by a stranger as if it might have a message for me. Does anyone else look so hard, everywhere, for clues?"
"The bill, limp and faded, almost tears as Ann removes it from her wallet; as if to imply the frailty of the exchange, she thinks, and is immediately disgusted with herself for looking everywhere for significance, for everywhere finding evidence that the fabric of life is threadbare and that she is about to fall through. And there’s another reason I like speed, she thinks, I never think such stupid things when I’m on it."
"Ann removes herself from her body; its demands are constant and aggravating: she is forever trying to ignore or silence them. Carl, who wants to see the breasts that he believes Ann would have were she heavier, bargains with her. “Five pounds,” he says. “Just five.” She looks at herself now, tries to see herself. It’s almost impossible: her defection has its price. All the reflections she seeks in the course of a day are not so much to ascertain how she looks, but that she is there."
"Because there is no sense that isn’t fabricated, no inherent meaning. Life has no meaning other than what we give it."
"Einstein said his sense of God was his sense of wonder at the universe. You’d think he, anyway, would have been smart enough to figure it out. But perhaps from where he was looking everything was orderly and beautiful, like seeing farms and fields from the window of a plane."
"I am so very tired sometimes of trying. I’m trying all the time, I don’t know how to do anything else. It looks like I’m breezing through, it looks like I couldn’t care less, it looks that way because I intend for it to look that way. And that person, the one underground, buried deep, a spadeful of earth insufficient to gag her, she’s not even someone you could talk to, I’m afraid she won’t stop screaming to listen even."
"“Tell me you love me,” she says. It is not what she intended to say.
“Ann,” he says, “I think I do love you. But I don’t know what that means—what it’s worth—when you’ve hidden yourself from me. I don’t know what it can mean to either of us.”"
"The answers could be combined in a seemingly infinite number of ways yet always will result in something dead."
"Your best bet is to throw random. In the long run random always wins. Your opponent can’t figure out your process if you have no process. But you can’t naturally throw random. You can’t generate random. No one can. Human minds generate patterns. It’s what they do. It’s what we do. Humans do patterns. Some professional gamblers memorize π starting at the hundredth decimal place, and use those numbers to make decisions that their opponents can’t possibly predict. Random is power. Completely committing to random would be a superpower."
"In one season of Celebrity Apprentice, the president of the United States of America, hosting the show before he was the president of the United States of America, said to a Vegas magician on the show that he—the fucking idiot Vegas magician—was one of the three people that Trump had ever met who was smarter than Trump himself. Donald had met only three people smarter than him in his life and one of them was a Vegas magician. Who were the other two, a balloon twister and a ventriloquist?"
"Because in the world we live in, it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time, that nothing is going to change ever, that people are evil and bad at the bottom. It feels sometimes that it’s being proven in various different ways, so I really get that. I understand why people feel that way. I just choose differently. I choose to think a different way, and I choose to act in a different way."
"He felt more than a little guilty, a feeling he told himself was irrational. But the remorse sat like a hot lump of lead in his chest. He thought of the friends he knew, the promises to keep in touch, the bonds he thought would never be severed. All of them were replaced by his drive to leave, to tackle the world, to transmute his pain into something he could sell."
"There’s a poem to be had tonight, if she can just get her fingers under its lid and open it up."
"Being in motion is not the same as being alive."
"It’s not that I’m unhappy in our apartment, but I have sometimes wondered whether my yearning for nature and the mountains is heightened by a need to escape from digital numbers and buttons and menus and things that beep and efficient little electric motors that hum away discreetly."
"I had ceded all control of my life to this feeling of a storm approaching, and the glad certainty it would demolish everything I knew."
"His face went slack for a long moment, that brief corpse face that comes when living is too difficult."
"New lovers are always digging their graves and lying down, smiling, scooping the dirt in with their clean hands."
"Her adoration had a way of leading my blood around in my body like an obedient dog."
". . . as if he has mixed up a palette of pastels, and given himself permission to brighten a Rembrandt."
"She courts underestimation. She plates and eats it with a dash of salt."
"The power of prohibition is fragile, especially once the lines seem arbitrary."
"One barber asked if he could shape my eyebrows; he said he wanted the practice. And so from then on, he’d thread my brows into a feminine shape, a small thing that made me feel more like the person I knew I was. It touched me deeply."
“Rheumatoid arthritis.”
“Oh, no way,” he says, in the same voice you’d use if someone told you their uncle had the same birthday as you.
“Do you know what I like about you?” I say. I can’t help it.
“I mean, hopefully a lot.”
“Do you ever just…” I pick up my hands and then drop them. “I don’t know. Do you ever just get really fucking mad at healthy people for doing nothing but…living their lives, and it’s not their fault, and you love them, but you just fucking hate them?”
“You forced me to give you poisonous gifts.
I can put this no other way.
Everything I gave was to get rid of you
As one gives to a beggar: There. Go away."
"Gamache felt a spike of anger. This was a form of murder. Peter Morrow had tried to kill not his wife, but her creation. He’d clearly recognized a work of genius and had tried to ruin it."
"That’s ridiculous. He has too high an opinion of himself. Loves himself too much. No, Peter might kill someone else, but never himself. In fact, I take that back. He’s much more likely to be the victim than the killer."
"Sometimes the only way up is down. Sometimes the only way forward is to back up. It seemed that was what Peter had done. Thrown out all he knew and started again. In his mid-fifties."
"“They’re his,” said Ruth decisively. “Not because they look like his but because no one in their right mind would take credit for these if they hadn’t painted them.”"
"Peter’s works seemed to remind people of disgusting chores. If he’d set out into the world to find a way to be useful, this probably wasn’t what he had in mind."
"He’d left all that was artistically safe behind. He’d broken the ropes, the rules, and sailed off, leaving the known world behind. Exploring. And he was having the time of his life."
"Peter was dismantling his life. Picking it apart. And replacing it with something new. Rebuilding."
"As he drove back to Three Pines, he thought about the Robert Frost quote. He’d come across it years ago and remembered it because, while a poem might begin as a lump in the throat, so did a murder investigation. So did a murder."
"She’d sent him away, hoping he’d change. But now faced with more evidence that he had, she found herself suddenly afraid. That he’d not only changed, but changed course. Away from her."
"“I think,” said Myrna slowly, “that Peter could afford to lose some of his mind. It wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.”"
"Madness spilled from the portrait. Uncontrollable, unharnessed. Something chained had broken free. It was in the mouth. It was in the eyes. It was in every brush stroke."
"“Isn’t that what Professor Norman, or No Man, was also offering? Inspiration? Freedom? No more rigid rules, no lockstep, no conformity. He was offering to help the young artists break away. Find their own way. And when their works were rejected by the establishment, he honored them.” Gamache held Clara’s eyes. “With their own Salon. And for his troubles he was despised, laughed at, marginalized.”"
"“By offering a second chance. One last chance. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in using your head. But not in spending too much time in there. Fear lives in the head. And courage lives in the heart. The job is to get from one to the other.”"
"Gamache thought about his friend Peter Morrow. Alone, afraid. Lost. And then at last Peter finds not one road, but two. One would lead him out of the wasteland, the other would lead him in circles. Mistaking movement for progress, as Ruth said. Professor Massey at one road, Professor Norman at another."
"Drowning men, they remembered words their grandmothers told them, forgot today and tomorrow in the drug of memories. A curtain of stars and stripes was hung over today and tomorrow and over the awful lessons of other days. It was a sucker age, an age for any propaganda, any cause, any lie, any gadget, and scorning this susceptibility chroniclers sang the stubborn cynicism of past heroes who would not believe the earth was round. It was an age of explosions, hurricanes, wrecks, strikes, lies, corruption, and unbridled female exploitation. Unable to find reason for this madness people looked to historical figures and ancient events for the pat answers."
"Her long neck leapt hungrily out of a rather rowdy décolletage."
"This being a period when no one knew which way the cat would jump, either in Europe or in home politics, Julian was reserving his ammunition for the most powerful bidder and marked time till ready with stinging criticisms of the medical profession for having no cure for the common cold, stern admonitions to childless parents (he fortunately had two children by his former marriage), and articles on Predestination, pro and con. In history’s dangerous hour Julian thus offered the world an aspirin."
"He was positive of his importance but was beset by the fear of ridicule, and this led him to quite ridiculous extremes."
"She didn’t know if he loved life, but she knew that he was actively pursuing not dying."
"“And what about the rumor about keyholes? That you can… become steam and go through them.” “I wish I could,” laughed the vampire. “How positively delightful. I should like to pass through all manner of different keyholes and feel the tickle of their peculiar shapes. No.” He shook his head. “That is, how would you say today… bullshit?”"
“People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don’t know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.”
"In front of me, a young girl dressed in white was clutching a photo with both hands, tears in her eyes. She kept glancing over toward the McDonald’s, where her father was waiting for her. Behind me, two older women were holding hands, speaking in Spanish. For so long, I had lived a solitary life, hoarding my memories of Lila like some secret treasure I couldn’t afford to lose, sifting through them, day by day, on my own, as if my sister’s death was a thing no one else could understand. Now, everywhere I looked, I met the faces of the dead."
"Every story is an invention, subject to the whims of the author. For the audience on the other side of the page, the words march forward with a certain inevitability, as if the story could exist one way only, the way in which it is written. But there is never just one way to tell a story. Someone has chosen the beginning and end. Someone has chosen who will emerge as the hero and who will play the villain. Each choice is made at the expense of an infinite number of variations. Who’s to say which version of the story is true?"
“He was waiting out his father’s disappointment as if it was a rainstorm and he happily settled in the window of a café with a newspaper and a hot chocolate, nowhere special to be. The squall would pass and he would venture back into the pale, clean-washed sunshine.”
“Her detachment was radical, and thrilling. It wasn’t that she didn’t notice what her parents did but that, having noticed, she then returned, unfazed, to the concerns and interests of her own life. Gwen, in the active process of collecting characteristics with which to furnish her future adult self, coveted this one in particular.”
"The house was a cold, dark intestine, an unending labyrinth of twists and turns packed into a seemingly finite space."
"There must be places for a girl of six, a boy of sixteen, and a woman of thirty-six to go. She could even invite along a man of twenty-six to level out the gender and age ratio."
"No wonder Matthew doubted the money had been spent on drugs. If it had, Harald would have had his work cut out for him, even if Keith Richards had been around to help."
"Witches had to go to extraordinary lengths to acquire such powers, including cooking and/or eating babies and having sex with the devil himself. Although she was no psychologist, Thóra guessed that the authors were sorely afflicted by the vows of chastity they had sworn as Black Friar monks."
“Listen.” Matthew turned to face her. “I have a suggestion.”
“What?” Thóra managed to keep her voice normal. She was almost feeling a little better.
“How would you like to review your opinion that this was a mistake?” He smiled at her. “I can put on my nice shoes, if you want.”
"They tried their best. I know that. But if that was their best? Well . . . better for us all to move on."
"I’ve wasted so much energy making excuses for guys like this, taken the high road so many times that I’d completely lost my sense of elevation."
"Brandon doesn’t look after his allies, but his allies are better than that. He’s a lucky man, not because I’ve forgiven him, but because I was nothing like him in the first place."
“She has learned to do her crying elsewhere, in measured bursts. That’s private, too. Sometimes she sits in coffee shops with her Walkman, earphones in. Then she cries. People don’t question it so much if there’s something playing in her ears. But what they don’t realise is that she’s not sad, all that was burnt out of her long ago – she’s gone. What they’re looking at is the charred case for her rage.”
“Writers are monsters, really. We eat everything we see.”
"For her, an ocean of unspoken urgency surrounds the hull of her leaky skiff of nervous chatter, so there are always words for her, and rarely a pause for consideration of content."
"We’re going to my mother’s version of the wizard, and out of the two of us, I’m the only one who cares what’s behind the curtain. My mother is not just content to be on the surface; staying superficial is necessary for her survival."
"I’m used to this expression on people. Behind their eyes, they’re wondering about me, connecting dots that, if I could read minds, I suspect would make me defensive and sad, even though they’re probably somewhat close to the truth."
"The attractive are often agents of the very thing that blesses them, stewardesses coming down the aisle with rolling carts of collateral damage."
"“Yo, Mack!” a woman shouts from the back storeroom. The change in the clerk is instantaneous, posture straightening and face lighting up. “Found a whole box of Hostess that expired last week! Date night’s on me, baby!”
The clerk lets out a tiny, high bubble of laughter, and Val’s aware she’s witnessed something private and precious. She wishes she could transform someone that completely just by calling their name."
"Isaac kicks at the hard-packed dirt. “So, what should we do now?” he asks, and she feels a pang of gratitude that he’s still including himself. Being with Isaac is easier than being alone. She’s never had that with a person before."
"You give up. You finally admit that the people who are supposed to love you will do anything to keep you in line. Will let anyone do anything to you if it means you stop fucking up their lives. And you don’t forget that lesson, don’t forget how it felt to stand in your dirty boxers, begging for clothes, while your family slept comfortably hundreds of miles away. Not when you go home, not when you go to college, not when you go to law school. Not when you marry the woman they chose for you, do the job they chose for you, pose and smile for the photo ops they chose for you. You never forget the lesson that they would rather destroy you than let you inconvenience them."
"She chose a system that promised to change her children to make her own life easier. She wanted dolls, not daughters."
“This place taught me I would only have value if I did what I was supposed to.”
"Andy Leonard spoke with the confidence of a trial lawyer who didn’t care if his client was guilty or not."
This page is under construction. Last updated October 26, 2025.
I'm aetataureate, or aeta. I'm an artist and writer.
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