The Isle of Youth: Stories
Laura van den Berg
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I like having a job where I get to wear a mask all day.”
“Over time, we became less sure we were something the other wanted to hold on to.”
“The five scientists from the Brazilian station always sat at their own table, isolated by their tragedy, which I understood. After my parents died, it took me months before I could carry on a conversation with someone who had not known them, who expected me to be young and sparkling and untouched by grief.”
“Maybe it was my imagination, or maybe I wanted someone to blame. I was willing to entertain those possibilities. What I didn't understand was why I couldn't do anything more than stand around in pain.”
“It was my habit to lie to strangers, because how would they know the difference?”
“I would whisper in the back row. Just run away. He never did, of course, and it wouldn’t have changed anything if he had.”
“Why didn't they go to school and get regular jobs and get married and live in houses? The short answer: they are a group of people committed to making life as hard as possible.”
“When you're married, our counselor had told us, happiness is like a joint banking account; it becomes full or depleted in tandem.”
“These could be her lessons. It’s right there for her, that better world. She barely has to go looking. Dana knows this, just as she knows that this is not the day she will find it.”
“Other people's lives were no less impossible to understand than my own.”
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Book Keywords:
untruths, life, helplessness, challenges, pain, inaction, other-people, understanding, marriage, truth, happiness, sympathy, death, passivity, lying, imagination, self-knowledge, partnership, blame, mourning, empathy, tragedy, unusual-lives, loss, difficulties, grief, isolation, regular-lives, strangers, death-of-a-parent
