“And for a moment―for a split second―everything else falls away, the whole pattern and order of my life, and a huge joy crests in my chest. I am no one, and I owe nothing to anybody, and my life is my own.”
“There is only what you want and what happens. There is only grabbing on and holding tight in the darkness.”
“All this time, I thought we were growing apart because I was leaving Lena behind. But really it was the reverse. She was learning to lie.
She was learning to love.”
“For the first time in a long time, I actually look at her. I've always thought Lena was pretty, but now it occurs to me that at some point - last summer? last year? - she became beautiful.”
“I'm mesmerized by the way his fingers move confidently along her skin, as though her body is his to reat and touch and tend to. She was mine before she was yours: The words are there, unexpectedly, surging from my throat to my tongue. I swallow them back.”
“And when we are with Alex, I might as well not be there. They speak in a language of whispers and giggles and secrets; their words are like a fairy-tale tangle of thorns, which place a wall between us.”
“Time becomes a stutter-the space between drumbeats, splintered into fragments, and also endlessly long, as long as soaring guitar notes that melt into one another, as full as the dark mass of bodies around me. I feel like the air downstairs has gone to liquid, to sweat and smell and sound, and I have broken apart in it. I am wave: I am pulled into the everything. I am energy and noise and a heartbeat going boom, boom, boom, echoing the drums.”
“This is one of my favorite things about the Underground: the crashing of the cymbals, the screeching guitar riffs, music that moves into the blood and makes you feel hot and wild and alive.”
“As Steve draws me closer to the band, all I can see is a frenzied mass of seething, writhing people, like a many-headed sea snake, grinding, waving their arms, stamping their feet, jumping. No rules, just energy - so much energy, you could harness it; I bet you could power Portland for a decade. It is more than a wave. It's a tide, an ocean of bodies.”
“She was mine before she was yours.”
“Every day, streets papered with more and more for .
Reward, reward, reward.
Reward for information.
If you see something, say something.
A paper town, a paper world: paper rustling in the airm whispering to me, hissing out a message of posion and jealousy.
If you know something, do something.
I'm sorry, Lena.”
“Perfect. There’s the word again: a locked-door word – stifling, strangling.”
“I don't know exactly what to wish for: to be safe or unsafe, for things to change or for things to stay the same.”
“If she could see the beauty of this underground world, and appreciate what it means: the music, the dancing, the feeling of fingertips and lips, like a moment of flight after a lifetime of crawling.”
“But I am going to keep going. I am going to soar, and soar, and break away—up, up, up into the thundering noise and the wind, like a bird being sucked into the sky.”
“She'll be fine," Alex says dismissively, as though I shouldn't worry about it—as though it's none of my concern. I have the sudden urge to kick him in the back of his head. He is kneeling in front of Lena, dabbing antibacterial cream on her leg. I'm mesmerized by the way his fingers move confidently along her skin, as though her body is his to treat and touch and tend to. She was mine before she was yours: The words are there, unexpectedly, surging from my throat to my tongue. I swallow them back.”
“Tonight the man in the moon looks as though he’s winking, or smirking: a moon with secrets.”
“Lena Ella Haloway Tiddle." I pronounce her full name, very slowly, partly because I need to reassure myself of her existence—Lena, my friend, the worried one, the one who always pleaded for safety first, who now makes secret appointments to meet with boys. "You have some explaining to do."
"Hana, you remember Alex," Lena says weakly, as though that—the fact of my remembering him—explains anything.
"Oh, I remember Alex," I say. "What I don't remember is why Alex is here. "
Lena makes a few unconvincing noises of excuse. Her eyes fly to his. A message passes between them. I can feel it, encoded and indecipherable, like a zip of electricity, as though I've just passed too close to one of the border fences. My stomach turns. Lena and I used to be able to speak like that.”
“Then someone knocks on the door, very clearly, four times. I pull away from Lena quickly.
"What's that?" I say, dragging my forearm across my eyes, trying to get control of myself. Lena tries to pass it off as though she hadn't heard. Her face has gone white, her eyes wide and terrified. When the knocking starts up again, she doesn't move, just stays frozen where she is.
"I thought nobody comes in this way." I cross my arms, watching Lena narrowly. There's a suspicious needling, pricking at some corner of my mind, but I can't quite focus on it.
"They don't. I mean—sometimes—I mean, the delivery guys—"
As she stammers excuses, the door opens, and he pokes his head in—the boy from the day Lena and I jumped the gate at the lab complex, just after we had our evaluations. His eyes land on me and he, too, freezes.
At first I think there must be a mistake. He must have knocked on the wrong door. Lena will yell at him now, tell him to clear off. But then my mind grinds slowly into gear and I realize that no, he has just called Lena's name. This was obviously planned.”
“For the first time in a long time, I actually look at her. I've always thought Lena was pretty, but now it occurs to me that at some point—last summer? last year?—she became beautiful. Her eyes seem to have grown even larger, and her cheekbones have sharpened. Her lips, on the other hand, look softer and fuller.
I've never felt ugly next to Lena, but suddenly I do. I feel tall and ugly and bony, like a straw-colored horse.”
“the desire to see him, to kiss him again, to let him put his fingers in my hair—is a monstrous, constant, crawling feeling in my blood and bones. It”
“I have Lena back again, but she is changed, and it seems that every day she grows a little more different, a little more distant, as though I am watching her walk down a darkening hallway.”
“I let the music drill through my teeth and drip out my hair and pound through my eyeballs. I taste it, like grit and sweat.”
“The flyers lift and sigh in unison, like a thousand people waving white handkerchiefs, a thousand people waving good-bye.”
“It’s worse than a disease. It’s a poison.”
“Hana?" Lena says softly. "Are you okay?"
That single stupid question breaks me. All the metal fingers relax me at once, and the tears they've been holding back come surging up at once. Suddenly I am sobbing and telling her everything: about the raid, and the dogs, and the sounds of skulls cracking underneath regulator's nightsticks. Thinking about it again makes me feel like I might puke. At a certain point, Lena puts her arms around me and starts murmuring things into my hair. I don't even know what she's saying, and I don't care. JUst having her here—solid, real, on my side—makes me feel better than I have in weeks. Slowly I manage to stop crying, swallowing back the hiccups and sobs that are still running through me. I try to tell her that I've missed her, and that I've been stupid and wrong, but my voice is muffled and thick”
“I came to find you last night," Lena says more quietly. "When I knew there was going to be a raid...I snuck out. I was there when—when the regulators came. I barely made it out. Alex helped me. We hid in a shed until they were gone..."
I close my eyes and reopen them. I remember wiggling into the damp earth, bumping my hip against the window. I remember standing, and seeing the dark forms of bodies lying like shadows in the grass, and the sharp geometry of a small she shed, nestled in the trees.
Lena was there. It was almost unimaginable.
"I can't believe that. I can't believe you snuck out during a raid—for me." My throat feels thick again, and I will myself not to start crying. For a moment I am overwhelmed by a feeling so huge and strange, I have no name for it: It surges over the guilt and the shock and the envy; it plunges a hand into the deepest part of myself and roots me to Lena.”
“Can he tell that I'm fucked up? Can he tell that I've been torn to pieces and put back together again?”
“The castle itself was a huge brick pile, built in the days of William III., which, though they were grand days for the construction of the constitution, were not very grand for architecture of a more material description.”
“Mostly, it will make me feel better. Please, Nikki. Right now I’m asking. Don’t make me demand.”
“I’m not backing out of the fight. I’m just choosing not to participate in it, especially when I know I don’t deserve to even participate, let alone win.”
“It's important to keep your options open.It's important to live and not get s hung up on the past.The past is called the past for a reason.If you are constantly looking behind you, your eyes aren't on the road ahead.You don't drive a car that way, so why would you live your life that way?.”
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