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Marlena
Julie Buntin
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Tell me what you can't forget, and I'll tell you who you are. I switch off my apartment light and she comes with the dark.”
“I've never believed in the idea of an innocent bystander. The act of watching changes what happens. Just because you don't touch anything doesn't mean you are exempt. You might be tempted to forgive me for being just fifteen, in over my head, for not knowing what to do, for not understanding, yet, the way even the tiniest choices domino, until you're irretrievably grown up, the person you were always going to be. Or in Marlena's case, the person you'll never have a chance to be. The world doesn't care that you're just a girl. Let the record show that I was smarter than I looked. And anyway, I touched.”
“When you grow up, who you were as a teenage either takes on a mythical importance or it's completely laughable. I wanted to be the kind of person who wiped those years away; instead, I feared, they defined me.”
“Why do they say ghosts are cold? Mine are warm, a breath dampening your cheek, a voice when you thought you were alone.”
“Great loneliness, profound isolation, a cataclysmic, overpowering sense of being misunderstood. When does that kind of deep feeling just stop? Where does it go? At fifteen, the world ended over and over and over again. To be so young is kind of a self-violence. No foresight, an inflated sense of wisdom, and yet you're still responsible for your mistakes. It's a little frightening to remember just how much, and how precisely, I felt. Now, if the world really did end, I think I'd just feel numb.”
“Sometimes I wonder how I’d tell this if I didn’t have so many books rattling around inside me. The truth is both a vast wilderness and the tiniest space you can imagine.”
“Privilege is something to be aware of, to fight to see beyond, but ultimately to be grateful for. It’s like a bulletproof vest; it makes you harder to kill.”
“Have you ever tried to demarcate the hours between the moment you thought you'd never fall asleep and the instant after opening your eyes, your bedroom flooded with the befuddling, sugary pink of dawn? Between point A and point B you exist, you are alive, your breath slowing, your body temperature dropping, the shadows cast by your furniture elongating and shrinking as the moon revolves through the sky above your flimsy house, if that's even where you really are. Every night, anything could happen, and you would never be the wiser. What I'm trying to say is that day, I learned that time doesn't belong to you. All you have is what you remember. A fraction; less.”
“One of us fell easily asleep, a million days left except that particular one, forever almost over, an ending that happens again and again no matter how much I don't want it to. Maybe that's all loss is. What happens, whether you like it or not. What won't let you go. Marlena - Look. I didn't forget. I wrote it down.”
“Whenever I hear the word danger, I see Marlena and me staring into the mouth of that U-Haul in the winter hour between twilight and dark. Two girls full of plans, fifteen and seventeen years old in the middle of nowhere. Stop, I want to tell us. Stay right where you are, together. Don't move. But we will. We always do. The clock's already running.”
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Book Keywords:
grief, loss, ghosts