He said the reason we studied history was to find out why things were the way they were, how we got here. He said you could do anything you wanted to people who didn’t know their history. That was the way a totalitarian system worked.
She was sorry to have hurt her, but she wanted them all to leave her alone, let her keep it together. Kindness was the last thing she needed. She had to stay in the icy place, the numb place, and their warmth threatened to melt her just when she needed the cold.
Her body felt like it’d been beaten with a hose. This must be what it felt like to get old. It wasn’t that your body fell apart from living so long. It was that you had to take so many stompings from life that you’d be happy when the time came to close your eyes and never open them again.
What was a weed, anyway. A plant nobody planted? A seed escaped from a traveler’s coat, something that didn’t belong? Was it something that grew better than what should have been there? Wasn’t it just a word, weed, trailing its judgments. Useless, without value. Unwanted.
She joked about her fears, but it was the kind of joke where you knew people thought it was ridiculous, and you pretended you thought so too, but underneath you were completely serious.
You’ve been everywhere, haven’t you.” I had, but it hadn’t done me much good.
His trips home were handholds for her, so she could swing from one square on the calendar to the next. When he said he was going to come home and didn’t, she swung forward and grasped thin air, fell.
The secret is – a magician doesn’t buy magic. Admire the skill of a magician, but never fall under his spell.” She rose and collected our glasses. And I thought of how Barry seduced my mother, his smoked mirrors and hidden trained doves. She never chose him, not really, but she gave him everything. She would always be his, even if he was dead. He had shaped her destiny.
He could see the flames in my hair, he knew my lips would scorch him.
Maybe that was the only real truth about the world, that there was no answer, that wisdom and experience were no better than a flat-out roll of the dice.
I felt just the way Billie Holiday sounded, like I’d cried all I could and it wasn’t enough.
Claire made me think it was worth trying. Of course you took the honors classes. Of course you wore your jewelry. Of course you signed up for art classes at the museum. Of course. In.
I cut a shred from my heart and dangled it on a homemade hook before her.
I had been moving too fast. I had been too hungry to become a woman.
She usually loved this band, but today their cheerfulness made her want to crash the car.
A month ago she would have been embarrassed at the confidence. Now she felt a surprising kinship. She was a citizen of the new land, a country she had never before visited, only a rumor, this vast unseen tract, its boundary exactly that of the whole world, taking up the space and shape of the world but completely unlike it. It had a different atmosphere, hard to breathe, and how heavy you were here, it pulled you down like the gravity on Jupiter.
Perfection was no protection. Disaster had a way of dropping by just when you least expected it.
She had forgotten about this, the narcotic of the crowd. This is why you came to hear music. To stop being yourself, to let that thing that you supposedly were go, and just be part of a mob, synchronized by the heavy beat, mesmerized by a singer with big smeary red lips, her spooky chant.
She shouldn’t be allowed to walk around. She might hurt someone.
Well, the universe had spoken. There was no one left to turn to.