“I tell her she's beautiful and perfect and she's going to be okay. I tell her she doesn't need to change herself to fit in with shallow girls or to matter to someone. I tell her everything I wish I had ever known. I tell her I love her, and I realize as I say it that I love me, too.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“The truth is, the world is a fucked up place sometimes.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“But progress is always dangerous, isn't it? Most of the time, walls don't get dismantled brick by brick. Someone has to crash through them.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“Remember when you used to hate me?”
I laugh-sniff-hiccup. “Well, you used to be insufferable.”
“I think incorrigible is a better word.”
I lean my forehead against the wall and let myself imagine for a moment that it’s his shoulder, warm and firm, beside me. “You’re so full of it.”
“Hey, I just got tortured for you. Easy on the ego.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“If you look like you belong, people assume you do.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“Loving someone doesn't ever completely go away.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“Let me look at you.” I pull away and put my hands on his cheeks, examining his face. Blue eyes, of course. And how could I forget that mouth? Thin pink lips with one crooked corner always suggesting a mocking smile. My God, how had I never noticed before how handsome he is? “You need a haircut.”
He rubs the side of his thumb over my cheekbone. “You’re beautiful.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“I guess you can never really know what's going on inside another person.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“I've been scared of so much stupid crap in my life. Making a bad grade or not fitting in. God, I was scared of you. And it was all such a waste. None of it matters now that the real scary shit is here.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“But soon we’ll be gone, so this is my last chance.” He gives me a shy little smile. “I love you.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“I squeeze Finn’s hand back, and my eyes fall closed. I feel something like the whisper of a touch to my face. Deep from the back of my mind, a voice that sounds a lot like my own speaks to me like a memory, telling me I’m strong and loved and that everything is going to be okay.
And, for some strange reason, I believe it.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“Time travel isn’t a wonder; it’s an abomination.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“It's a silence I know. The kind that's actually a sound so loud your brain doesn't know how to interpret it at first.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“Well, that was easy,' I whisper as we follow the little signs with arrows that lead toward room 126. 'No, that was very dangerous and daring, and it was only through my extreme charm that we pulled it off.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“I almost regret having to tell him this. No one should be confronted with the depths of darkness they're capable of all at once.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“How long have I loved Finn? It crept up on me so gradually, I don't know if I can even pin the moment down.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“There are risks, but progress is always dangerous, isn't it? Most of the time, walls don't get dismantled brick by brick. Someone has to crash through them.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“It's always been you and me, James. That's why I can't kill you, and you can't kill me. Because even if it means the end of the world, I love you too much.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“It's time you started seeing how great you are, just like you wish Marina could see it. I mean, look at me. I think I'm fantastic.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“I hate you,' I say. 'I know,' he says, and he holds me until I can breathe again. I pull away and wipe my eyes. 'Sorry,' I mumble. 'It's okay. I'm sure I'll deserve it one day.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“If I don't want, I can't be disappointed.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“I look down at the gun. It's jammed. Stupid semiautomatic piece of crap.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“I quickly remember what Finn taught me about how to get what you want from people: pay attention to them, figure out what they want and what they're afraid of.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“I tell her everything I wish I had ever known.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“I watch James's face. His expression is an open book to me, because I took the time to learn the language many years ago.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“I struggle to keep my hard, expressionless mask in place. The doctor's most powerful weapon has always been his particular brand of brutal honesty. Bruises fade, but words like that fester.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“I stop, because a little piece of me can't help hoping. I turn to look at him, and know, to my shame, that he could break my resolve with a single word.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“He's got it all. The lineage, the resources, the perfect presidential hair. He'd be crazy not to run.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“How can you be so cruel?' 'You'll find out.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“When it comes to James Shaw, it seems, I will never learn.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
Cristin Terrill
Born place: in The United States
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“All women like men to be strong and decided and following out their careers. A woman wants to be motherly to a man and protect his weak side, but he must have a strong side too, which she can respect ... If you ever care for a woman, I don't advise you to let her see that you've got no ambition. Otherwise she'll get to despise you.”
― Christopher Isherwood, quote from Goodbye to Berlin
“Can they love without a word for it?”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from Dying of the Light
“Igual que en la ética el mal es consecuencia del bien, en realidad de la alegría nace la tristeza.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, quote from Berenice
“The last time the Right Honourable Gentleman raised the accusation about the policies of this government forcing his constituents to resort to inedible foods—in that case, as I remember, it was ants, earwigs, and glowworms—the National Health looked very seriously into the matter, and their inspectors. . . .” “Division! Division!” cried out some who had got the scent of blood, and Mallet Scuffs himself, successfully diverted, cried out, “Weevils, too! Weevils and grubs!” “Their inspectors. . . .” “Weevils, too, weevils and grubs! Weevils, too, weevils and grubs!” chanted a Marxist anti-missile faction.”
― Mark Helprin, quote from Freddy and Fredericka
“The Bostonians is special because it never was ‘titivated’ for the New York edition, for its humour and its physicality, for its direct engagement with social and political issues and the way it dramatized them, and finally for the extent to which its setting and action involved the author and his sense of himself. But the passage above suggests one other source of its unique quality. It has been called a comedy and a satire – which it is. But it is also a tragedy, and a moving one at that. If its freshness, humour, physicality and political relevance all combine to make it a peculiarly accessible and enjoyable novel, it is also an upsetting and disturbing one, not simply in its treatment of Olive, but also of what she tries to stand for. (Miss Birdseye is an important figure in this respect: built up and knocked down as she is almost by fits and starts.) The book’s jaundiced view of what Verena calls ‘the Heart of humanity’ (chapter 28) – reform, progress and the liberal collectivism which seems so essential an ingredient in modern democracy – makes it contentious to this day. An aura of scepticism about the entire political process hangs about it: salutary some may say; destructive according to others. And so, more than any other novel of James’s, it reminds us of the literature of our own time. The Bostonians is one of the most brilliant novels in the English language, as F. R. Leavis remarked;27 but it is also one of the bleakest. In no other novel did James reveal more of himself, his society and his era, and of the human condition, caught as it is between the blind necessity of progress and the urge to retain the old. It is a remarkably experimental modern novel, written by a man of conservative values. It is judgemental about people with whom its author identified, and lenient towards attitudes hostile to large areas of James’s own intellectual and personal inheritance. The strength of the contradictions embodied in the novel are a guarantee of the pleasure it has to give.”
― Henry James, quote from The Bostonians
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