“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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“Every day, the pain of that moment has scored through me. The humiliation and anger and misery and rejection. So many emotions that churn over me, always forcing me to feel it all fresh again and again - never in my life had I felt so ugly and unwanted.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dark and Hollow Places
“Dying for something is easy because it is associated with glory. Living for something is the hard thing. Living for something extends beyond fashion, glory, or recognition. We live for what we believe.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
“We knew what we had and what it meant, and though so much had happened since for both of us, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure and simple and good, and I believed Ernest was his best self then. I got the very best of him. We got the best of each other.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“in moments of crisis, people are willing to hand over a great deal of power to anyone who claims to have a magic cure—whether the crisis is a financial meltdown or, as the Bush administration would later show, a terrorist attack.”
― Naomi Klein, quote from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
“I can't leave her there all alone, surrounded by stone walls... She's too precious to give up.”
― Megan Whalen Turner, quote from The Queen of Attolia
The Yearling
In the Woods
The Marriage Bargain
The Name of the Star
Three Weeks With My...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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