Quotes from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn’t have. Maybe there’s a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. Waiting to make me feel the same impossibility over and over again.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn't like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size. You were a boy, and already it was certain you wouldn't be a mother and it was likely you wouldn't become a manicurist or a kindergarten teacher. Then you started to grow up and everything you did closed the tunnel in some more. You broke your arm climbing a tree and you ruled out being a baseball pitcher. You failed every math test you ever took and you canceled any hope of being a scientist. Like that. On and on through the years until you were stuck. You'd become a baker or a librarian or a bartender. Or an accountant. And there you were. I figured that on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you'd have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“Nothing had changed. I was the stupid one again. I was the girl who never understood who she was to people.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“That's what being shy feels like. Like my skin is too thin, the light too bright. Like the best place I could possibly be is in a tunnel far under the cool, dark earth. Someone asks me a question and I stare at them, empty-faced, my brain jammed up with how hard I'm trying to find something interesting to say. And in the end, all I can do is nod or shrug, because the light of their eyes looking at me, waiting for me, is just too much to take. And then it's over and there's one more person in the world who thinks I'm a complete and total waste of space.
The worst thing is the stupid hopefulness. Every new party, every new bunch of people, and I start thinking that maybe this is my chance. That I'm going to be normal this time. A new leaf. A fresh start. But then I find myself at the party, thinking, Oh, yeah. This again.
So I stand on the edge of things, crossing my fingers, praying nobody will try to look me in the eye. And the good thing is, they usually don't.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds, if you want them to be there.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“I knew the way lost hopes could be dangerous, how they could turn a person into someone they never thought they'd be.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“Because maybe I don't want to leave the planet invisible. Maybe I need at least one person to remember something about me.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“The sun kept on with its slipping away, and I thought how many small good things in the world might be resting on the shoulders of something terrible.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“You can build a whole world around the tiniest of touches.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“I thought of all the different kinds of love in the world. I could think of ten without even trying. The way parents love their kids, the way you love a puppy or chocolate ice cream or home or your favorite book or your sister. Or your uncle. There's those kinds of love and then there's the other kind. The falling kind.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“Once you know a thing you can’t ever unknow it.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“If my life was a film, I’d have walked out by now.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“Watching people is a good hobby, but you have to be careful about it. You can’t let people catch you staring at them. If people catch you, they treat you like a first-class criminal. And maybe they’re right to do that. Maybe it should be a crime to try to see things about people they don’t want you to see.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“My mother gave me a disappointed look. Then I gave her one back. Mine was for everything, not just the sandwich.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“I had no idea how greedy my heart really was.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“You could try to believe what you wanted, but it never worked. Your brain and your heart decided what you were going to believe and that was that. Whether you liked it or not.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“But maybe I am. Maybe that’s exactly what I am. Maybe all I wanted was for Toby to hear the wolves that lived in the dark forest of my heart. And maybe that’s what it meant. Tell the Wolves I’m Home. Maybe Finn understood everything, as usual. You may as well tell them where you live, because they’ll find you anyway. They always do.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I kept looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“Sometimes it feels good to take the long way home.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“There are dark black buttons tattooed on my heart. I’ll carry them for the rest of my days.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“She was wired into my heart. Twisted and kinked and threaded right through.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“…there’s just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on. It makes you believe you’re special, even though you know you’re not.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“You think I don't know about wrong love, June? You think I don't understand embarrassing love?”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“I thought it was good to test yourself sometimes. It was good to see how much you could take.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“Toby was right. Finn was my first love. But Toby, he was my second. And the sadness in that stretched like a thin cold river down the length of my whole life.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“I don’t like to overhear things, because, in my experience, things your parents are keeping quiet about are things you don’t want to know.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“The bed was warm and ordinary and perfect, and it had been such a long, long day. Probably the longest day of my life. I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds, if you want them to be there.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“Maybe you had to be dying to finally get to do what you wanted.

I fidgeted around with the puzzle pieces for a while longer, but I wasn't lucky. Nothing seemed to fit without a whole lot of work.

Then I had this thought: What if it was enough to realize that you would die someday, that none of this would go on forever? Would that be enough?”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, quote from Tell the Wolves I'm Home

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