Quotes from work

In the Woods

“I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.”

“Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.”

“Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.”

“I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.”

“There was a time when I believed I was the redeemed one, the boy borne safely home on the ebb of whatever freak tide carried Peter and Jamie away. Not any more. In ways too dark and crucial to be called metaphorical, I never left that wood.”

“If she had hurt me, I could have forgiven her without even having to think about it; but I couldn't forgive her for being hurt.”

“I am, of course, romanticizing; a chronic tendency of mine.”

“Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different”

“For a moment, I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be alright.”

“We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.”

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

“What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this -- two things: I crave truth. And I lie.”