Melanie > Books: buddy-reads‎ (340)

“I choose Greek myths and ghost stories, tales that come in under fourteen pages and culminate in violent lessons. I read aloud and let her stop me when she wants to – stories of swans and spiders, bay trees, narcissi, girls transformed into monsters by rivals playing dirty.”

“You don't notice the way a city breathes until it changes its sleeping habits.”

“That's the problem with kissing. In theory, when someone's good at it, you should be able to keep kissing forever. But of course, forever is too long to do anything without getting bored.”

“The house opened around her the way you crack a chest cavity, the ribs of it, the unnatural gape.”

“...you don't come to a party you weren't invited to.”

“Maggie always found it a little unfair that her mother should encourage her to be fiercely independent, whilst also making a horror story out of being alone.”

“From this pretense of space, she can play-act other nights, other weekends, when the house was furnished with more than the memory of things.”

“She slid an arm around me and kissed me on the side of the mouth in a way that made me love her terribly, though I had promised God the opposite only minuets before.”

“A very slender sort of betrayal, the deliberate absence from a room.”

“I have hungered for you in ways you cannot comprehend. I've craved you. More than my sin. You haunt me.”

“I have hungered for you in ways you cannot comprehend. I've craved you. More than my sin. You haunt me.”

“I dreamt myths larger than my girl body could hold.”

“I dreamt myths larger than my girl body could hold.”

“Believe me when I tell you, you are not tethe

“Believe me when I tell you, you are not tethered to your abuser.”

“Her conviction, born of long days and longer nights, was that if the world

“Her conviction, born of long days and longer nights, was that if the world contained magic at all, then it could not also contain their war.”

“It was so much easier to hate a man than a system: vast, inhuman, bloodstained.”

“One day love became not an offering of safety, but a reminder of everything cruel and dangerous in the world.”

“One day love became not an offering of safety, but a reminder of everything cruel and dangerous in the world.”

“It was the first time I thought about how strange it was that the thing I spent all my time doing belonged to a culture that wasn't mine. But my p

“It was the first time I thought about how strange it was that the thing I spent all my time doing belonged to a culture that wasn't mine. But my parents were the ones who taught me piano. It is just as much a part of my blood as it is hers.”

“But maybe you should question the people who taught you this version of God. Because it's not doing you any favors.”

“...maybe I could make a cobbler that pleased God. And maybe that would please my mother.”

“That should have been the end of it. But when do mediocre men ever go away quietly?”

“Outside, the rain was repeating us, saying my words to the pavement: please, please.”

“She was drawn to these books—girls with powers, girls who were monstrous, girls who had the potential to be terrible and violent things.”

“You can feel the internal prayer the woman recites, hoping he will come.”

“If I drown in this ocean tell my mother I’m still angry
If I drown in this ocean tell my body it’s okay to rest.”

“Being the worse girl means, at least, I'll be remembered”

“If she wanted either of us to be that kind of daughter, she should have been that kind of mother.”

“I always thought evil hung in the sky above our heads, the black whorl of it, a portal to darkness. That’s where storms came from—when the evil got too great and God had to release some of it down on us. We had to pay a little bit for it.”

“They ask me where I have been, and I tell them travelling. They understand that. They have grown through the dark themselves.”

“We die; we leave ghosts of ourselves behind. Voices on answering machines, bodies on video, fragments of souls in handwriting.”