“Maybe we aren't so very different after all. There's good and bad in both of us, and that's what binds us together, for better or worse.”
“If Chase's wings are broken, then mine are shattered.”
“Kay is a sandcastle on the beach, and I'm a fucking hurricane. I'd not only wash her away, I'd fucking destroy her.”
“Tell me, Chase. Tell me what I think I already know. Tell me what you’re feeling. I feel it too, I do.' My slaughtered heart stitches back together, more solid than ever. `I love you,' I whisper. `I love you so fucking much.”
“You're not broken.' I touch the angel between the wings on his back for emphasis. 'You're putting your life back together. Building isn't breaking, Chase.”
“We both still, lips touching, breaths shared. This is what we are, two broken people who when connected are made whole, made right. I feel this everywhere, my body, my heart, my soul.”
“My tats were but temporal attempts to heal my soul, as my heart remained an open wound.”
“I knew the things happening in my life would eventually define my future, and I guess I hoped no matter what occurred those things wouldn't ultimately define me.”
“As I stand before you, judge me not.”
“He kisses me hard, tells me between frenzied kisses, `You feel so good, beautiful, beautiful, sweet girl. Feel how much I want you.' He circles his hips against mine. `I want you like this all the fucking time.”
“For Chase, I accept dares, I'm learning to take chances. He makes me feel unafraid.”
“I decide this day with Chase Gartner--my friend, my maybe-possibility--is the best one yet.”
“As we held tightly to one another, like two lost ships on a sea of confusion, I breathed in the guy I've grown to care for so very much.”
“This is what Kay needs right now, soft touching and caring. When we're together, I want to love her just like this.”
“It’s at that exact second I realize—in a rush, like a wave crashing all around me—I have fallen in love. I am head over heels in love with Chase Gartner.”
“Chase has made me feel a lot of things today, things I thought I’d never feel again—excitement, giddiness, lust, possibility. But the most important one—the one I want to cling to like a girl who’s been stumbling around for too long in the dark and has just spotted a sliver of light—is hope.”
“Hi,' Kay says all shy-like, as if she's suddenly not sure if she should be here. To me, she looks like she's belonged here all along.”
“Chase and I are in this for the long haul. I've stood before him and he's stood before me. And this is what it's all come down to: Chase Gartner is my future, my forever. And I, I am his.”
“I like this dirty Chase, this crude and irreverent man. I want to go where he's taking me. I need to be dragged down to where he is so we can build ourselves back up, together, stronger.”
“I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.”
“Just think of a safe location."
"Are there tennis balls in the soup?"
"Come on, be serious."
"A pear camping highway fire mask," he said, more intensely.
My heart rate, which had finally started slowing, sped up again.”
“I brushed my teeth like a crazed lunatic as I examined myself in the mirror. Why couldn’t I look the women in commercials who wake up in a bed with ironed sheets and a dewy complexion with their hair perfectly tousled? I wasn’t fit for human eyes, let alone the piercing eyes of the sexy, magnetic Marlboro Man, who by now was walking up the stairs to my bedroom. I could hear the clomping of his boots.
The boots were in my bedroom by now, and so was the gravelly voice attached to them. “Hey,” I heard him say. I patted an ice-cold washcloth on my face and said ten Hail Marys, incredulous that I would yet again find myself trapped in the prison of a bathroom with Marlboro Man, my cowboy love, on the other side of the door. What in the world was he doing there? Didn’t he have some cows to wrangle? Some fence to fix? It was broad daylight; didn’t he have a ranch to run? I needed to speak to him about his work ethic.
“Oh, hello,” I responded through the door, ransacking the hamper in my bathroom for something, anything better than the sacrilege that adorned my body. Didn’t I have any respect for myself?
I heard Marlboro Man laugh quietly. “What’re you doing in there?” I found my favorite pair of faded, soft jeans.
“Hiding,” I replied, stepping into them and buttoning the waist.
“Well, c’mere,” he said softly.
My jeans were damp from sitting in the hamper next to a wet washcloth for two days, and the best top I could find was a cardinal and gold FIGHT ON! T-shirt from my ‘SC days. It wasn’t dingy, and it didn’t smell. That was the best I could do at the time. Oh, how far I’d fallen from the black heels and glitz of Los Angeles. Accepting defeat, I shrugged and swung open the door.
He was standing there, smiling. His impish grin jumped out and grabbed me, as it always did.
“Well, good morning!” he said, wrapping his arms around my waist. His lips settled on my neck. I was glad I’d spritzed myself with Giorgio.
“Good morning,” I whispered back, a slight edge to my voice. Equal parts embarrassed at my puffy eyes and at the fact that I’d slept so late that day, I kept hugging him tightly, hoping against hope he’d never let go and never back up enough to get a good, long look at me. Maybe if we just stood there for fifty years or so, wrinkles would eventually shield my puffiness.
“So,” Marlboro Man said. “What have you been doing all day?”
I hesitated for a moment, then launched into a full-scale monologue. “Well, of course I had my usual twenty-mile run, then I went on a hike and then I read The Iliad. Twice. You don’t even want to know the rest. It’ll make you tired just hearing about it.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, his blue-green eyes fixed on mine. I melted in his arms once again. It happened any time, every time, he held me.
He kissed me, despite my gold FIGHT ON! T-shirt. My eyes were closed, and I was in a black hole, a vortex of romance, existing in something other than a human body. I floated on vapors.
Marlboro Man whispered in my ear, “So…,” and his grip around my waist tightened.
And then, in an instant, I plunged back to earth, back to my bedroom, and landed with a loud thud on the floor.
“R-R-R-R-Ree?” A thundering voice entered the room. It was my brother Mike. And he was barreling toward Marlboro Man and me, his arms outstretched.
“Hey!” Mike yelled. “W-w-w-what are you guys doin’?” And before either of us knew it, Mike’s arms were around us both, holding us in a great big bear hug.
“Well, hi, Mike,” Marlboro Man said, clearly trying to reconcile the fact that my adult brother had his arms around him.
It wasn’t awkward for me; it was just annoying. Mike had interrupted our moment. He was always doing that.”
“It would evidently take more than a political regime, more than dire poverty to stop a woman from wanting to be well-dressed: it was a desire as old as the world, as old as the desire for children.”
“Cea mai gravă infracțiune a lui fusese să accepte lumea în care trăia ca pe una normală, rațională și corectă. Ca toți ceilalți, permisese publicității să îi multiplice dorințele; învățase să echivaleze fericirea cu posesiunile, iar prosperitatea cu banii cheltuiți la magazin.”
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