Drowning Instinct

This is a fairy tale with teeth and claws.

They call it the drowning instinct. It's when drowning doesn't look like drowning. (pg. 241)

What's the point of not taking chances? I don't know if I could stand living my whole life afraid.

Everybody breaks sooner or later, Bob. Anyone can drown. Sometimes you see it. Most often, you don’t because the body protects and the skin hides, so drowning doesn’t look like drowning and some people scar so nicely. Take it from an expert.

They call it the drowning instinct. It´s when drowning doesn´t look like drowning. In real life, if the water´s very cold, a person can´t help but gasp. It´s reflex. The thing is as soon as water hits your lungs, your throat closes off, even it the water´s warm. Your body´s trying to protect itself, and the reality is that a lot more people suffocate than truly drown. Regardless, to people on land, especially when you´re really close to the end, you don´t look like you´re in trouble. You don´t scream, but that´s because you can ´t, and you don´t wave your arms either or expend a lot of energy flailing. You´re just there. So people don´t notice that you´re drowning. That´s me. I think I´ve been drowning all this time and doing it so quietly, even I didn´t know it.

She's got the kind of ethereal, unselfconscious beauty some young girls possess that breaks your heart. Or theirs.

We all have our fictions, little lies we tell ourselves to keep going from one day to the next.

So I need the story, Jenna. I need the truth. Right, like the two are the same thing.

We were like matching bookends, almost touching but with volumes between us and stories, so many stories.

That´s the problem with the truth. Sometimes the truth is ambiguous, or really bad cliche.

There are those individuals who die for a cause, and we say they have made the ultimate sacrifice. We call them martyrs, and we never doubt their sincerity. Yet many others search their entire lives for something—or someone—worth dying for and this is very different. These are the lonely and the desperate, fearful that their lives have no meaning. They yearn for the bullet, if only someone else will pull the trigger.

The grief in her green eyes slips then hardens and, for an instant, Pendleton sees the woman she has become and has no right being, not at sixteen.

Because if you can just hold off the moment when you must confront reality, time stands still and you can keep pretending that life will continue as you´ve known it: that nothing-not even something as wonderful and as terrible as love-has broken your world beyond repair.

For that matter, my heart is broken. So maybe they´ĺl give me his. It´s something to shoot for. And maybe, in all that, Bob? There is forgiveness...

...she said all writers were prima donnas, drunks, social misfits, pompous, or depressed. Brilliant, maybe, but completely crazy.

Not everyone wears their scars on their skin.

Honestly, Bob: how do you carve a scream?

You know, Bob, school is school, one of those life experiences we kids all have to get through in order to become you. Then we wonder what all the fuss was about, especially while we're cleaning up your little messes: toxic waste, war, bank bailouts. Honestly, if we ran up debt the way you guys do? You'd ground us, take away our cells, and make us clean toilets with a toothbrush until we'd pay back every penny.

I think. I sense. I wonder.

I´d never heard a man cry before, Bob, but...it´s awful. (...) I think some man aren´t used to it and don´t know what to do with all that feeling. Their emotions are hexane ignited in their chests and rips them apart, and then they feel like they´re going to die-just as something was dying, at that moment in Mitch.

Tell yourself you’re dead, the way Matt does, so the past can’t hurt you.

It was, come to think of it, a little like a kinder, gentler Psycho-Dad making one of his command decisions. Exactly the same, only without all the fuss and blood.

Don't get so caught up in looking behind you forget to look ahead.

So I think I’ll stay here a little while longer. There’s plenty of time to get off this gurney and open that door and rejoin the rest of you. There’s all the time I have left on Earth. There’s the rest of my life.

...what's the point of not taking chances? I don't know if I could stand living my whole life afraid.

What about study hall? Shouldn't I go to the library? "What for, Ms. Lord?" Mr. anderson said. "You're with me

Dewerman was this bearded 1960’s throwback: a Teletubby in tie-dye, suspenders, and thinning hair scraped back into a stringy gray rat.