Please believe him. Keep your heart open to him. He can make you happy. He has always loved you, and you once loved him with all your heart.
I’m not going anywhere without you. We’re swimming to China together. And if the worst happens, I’m dying with you before I’m living without you.
How sad it was, Carmen thought, that you acted awful when you were desperately sad and hurt and wanted to be loved. How tragic then, the way everyone avoided you and tiptoed around you when you really needed them. Carmen knew this vicious predicament as well as anyone in the world. How bitter it felt when you acted badly to everyone and ended up hating yourself the most.
It was a blessing and also a curse of handwritten letters that unlike email you couldn’t obsessively reread what you’d written after you’d sent it. You couldn’t attempt to un-send it. Once you’d sent it it was gone. It was an object that no longer belonged to you but belonged to your recipient to do with what he would. You tended to remember the feeling of what you’d said more than the words. You gave to object away and left yourself with the memory. That was what it was to give.
It was funny how the old practices always came around again. It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance. Scientists hated to look backward for anything.
What was it about Eric? He was handsome and talented, yeah. But lots of guys were. She had adored Billy Klein back in Alabama the summer before, and she had even felt attracted to him, but it wasn’t like this. What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.
Tibby sat on the outside of a group of kids in the film program. There was a lot of dark clothing and heavy footwear, and quite a few piercings glinting in sunlight. They had invited her to sit with them while they all finished up their lunches before film seminar. Tibby knew that they had invited her largely because she had a ring in her nose. This bugged her almost as much as when people excluded her because she had a ring in her nose.
In a way it scared me, having a summer of experiences and feelings that belonged to me alone. What happened in front of my friends felt read. What happened to me by myself felt partly dreamed, partly imagined, definitely shifted and warped by own fears and wants. And who knows? Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.
She was never going to be the kind of person who didn’t stick out in all directions. To want it was the same as hating herself. That was the truth. She breathed those words. She could have repeated them a hundred times and they wouldn’t have hurt any worse. Reality was stubborn for sure, but it was large and it had possibilities. It was a sweet relief when you let it come.
Her need was as big as the stars, and he was down there on the beach, so quiet she could hardly hear him.
We’re the Septembers now. The real ones. We are everything to one another. We don’t need to say so; it’s just true. Sometimes it seems like we’re so close we form one single complete person rather than four separate ones. We settle into types- Bridget the athlete, Lena the beauty, Tibby the rebel, and me, Carmen, the... what? The one with the bad temper. But the one who cares the most. The one who cares that we stick together.
Carmen: “I want you to leave me alone, but not ignore me. I want you to miss me when I go away to college, but not be sad. I want you to stay exactly the same, but not be lonely or alone. I want to do the leaving, and not have you ever leave me.
I Pantaloni ci promettevano che c’era tempo. Niente sarebbe andato perduto. Avevamo un anno intero, se ce ne fosse stato bisogno. Avevamo tutta la strada fino all’estate successiva: allora avremmo tirato fuori i Pantaloni e, insieme o separate, avremmo ricominciato da capo.
Maybe we tried so hard to be like the Sisterhood because it was easy for them and we wanted it to be easy for us. Because they were lucky and we wanted to be lucky too. They had wonder, and we didn’t have any. We looked for the magic, but we didn’t fine it. We waited for the magic, but it didn’t find us.
My mother says it can’t stay like this, but I believe it will. The Pants are like an omen. They stand for the promise we made to one another, that no matter what happens, we stick together. But they stand for a challenge too. It’s not enough to stay in Bethesda, Maryland, and hunker down in air-conditioned houses. We promise one another that someday we’d get out in the world and figure some stuff out.
The real lesson embodied in Katherine’s three-year-old frame was the opposite: Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. – Winston Churchill.
It was amazing, really, the effort that went into the absence of things.
Once Paul told her that the beach was like him because it changed every day but never made progress.
She was worried these thoughts would crush her if she let them come, but they didn’t. You didn’t know how heavy they were until you tried to lift them. You didn’t know how strong you were.