“This is a fairy tale with teeth and claws.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“They call it the drowning instinct. It's when drowning doesn't look like drowning. (pg. 241)”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“What's the point of not taking chances? I don't know if I could stand living my whole life afraid.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“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.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“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.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“She's got the kind of ethereal, unselfconscious beauty some young girls possess that breaks your heart. Or theirs.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“We all have our fictions, little lies we tell ourselves to keep going from one day to the next.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“So I need the story, Jenna. I need the truth.
Right, like the two are the same thing.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“We were like matching bookends, almost touching but with volumes between us and stories, so many stories.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“That´s the problem with the truth.
Sometimes the truth is ambiguous, or really bad cliche.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“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.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“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.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“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.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“When the heart sinks, people fall.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“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...”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“...she said all writers were prima donnas, drunks, social misfits, pompous, or depressed. Brilliant, maybe, but completely crazy.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“Not everyone wears their scars on their skin.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“Honestly, Bob: how do you carve a scream?”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“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.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“I think. I sense. I wonder.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“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.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“Tell yourself you’re dead, the way Matt does, so the past can’t hurt you.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“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.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“Don't get so caught up in looking behind you forget to look ahead.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“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.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“...what's the point of not taking chances? I don't know if I could stand living my whole life afraid.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“What about study hall? Shouldn't I go to the library?
"What for, Ms. Lord?" Mr. anderson said. "You're with me”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
“Dewerman was this bearded 1960’s throwback: a Teletubby in tie-dye, suspenders, and thinning hair scraped back into a stringy gray rat.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Drowning Instinct
Ilsa J. Bick
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“I swear, the reason for full moons is so the gods can more clearly see the mischief they create.”
― Michael J. Sullivan, quote from Age of Myth
“Then quiet, but clear as a shout, the King called, ‘Here!’ and flung his own sword, hilt first, into the air. Arthur’s hand shot out and caught it by the hilt. I saw it catch the light. The white horse reared again. The standard was up, and streaming in the wind, scarlet on gold. There was a great shout, spreading out from the centre of the field where the white stallion, treading blood, leapt forward under the Dragon banner. Shouting, the men surged with him. I saw the standardbearer hesitate fractionally, looking back at the King, but the King waved him forward, then lay back, smiling, in his chair. And”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills
“Well, you have the right to make a sacrifice of yourself, but I'll be damned if I'll let you sacrifice me!”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Black Sheep
“A Forge, and a Scythe"
One minute I had the windows open
and the sun was out. Warm breezes
blew through the room.
(I remarked on this in a letter.)
Then, while I watched, it grew dark.
The water began whitecapping.
All the sport-fishing boats turned
and headed in, a little fleet.
Those wind-chimes on the porch
blew down. The tops of our trees shook.
The stove pipe squeaked and rattled
around in its moorings.
I said, "A forge, and a scythe."
I talk to myself like this.
Saying the names of things --
capstan, hawser, loam, leaf, furnace.
Your face, your mouth, your shoulder
inconceivable to me now!
Where did they go? It's like
I dreamed them. The stones we brought
home from the beach lie face up
on the windowsill, cooling.
Come home. Do you hear?
My lungs are thick with the smoke
of your absence.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from All of Us: The Collected Poems
“Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.
The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out my garbage gcan, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the junior droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrapper. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?)
While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of the morning: Mr Halpert unlocking the laundry's handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia's son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement's super intendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning English his mother cannot speak. Now the primary childrren, heading for St. Luke's, dribble through the south; the children from St. Veronica\s cross, heading to the west, and the children from P.S 41, heading toward the east. Two new entrances are made from the wings: well-dressed and even elegant women and men with brief cases emerge from doorways and side streets. Most of these are heading for the bus and subways, but some hover on the curbs, stopping taxis which have miraculously appeared at the right moment, for the taxis are part of a wider morning ritual: having dropped passengers from midtown in the downtown financial district, they are now bringing downtowners up tow midtown. Simultaneously, numbers of women in housedresses have emerged and as they crisscross with one another they pause for quick conversations that sound with laughter or joint indignation, never, it seems, anything in between. It is time for me to hurry to work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro, the short, thick bodied, white-aproned fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street, his arms folded, his feet planted, looking solid as the earth itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back at eachother and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know what it means: all is well.
The heart of the day ballet I seldom see, because part off the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks. But from days off, I know enough to know that it becomes more and more intricate. Longshoremen who are not working that day gather at the White Horse or the Ideal or the International for beer and conversation. The executives and business lunchers from the industries just to the west throng the Dorgene restaurant and the Lion's Head coffee house; meat market workers and communication scientists fill the bakery lunchroom.”
― Jane Jacobs, quote from The Death and Life of Great American Cities
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