Laura Creedle · 352 pages
Rating: (1K votes)
“Yes,” Abelard said finally. “You are a fractured snowflake, a pattern repeated in infinite detail in a world full of salt crystals. You’re not broken—you’re perfect.” Perfect. Some tight, hard shell around my heart cracked open. I hadn’t even known I’d walled my heart away from this terrible world.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“I couldn't stop thinking about him. He was an attractive nuisance, a shiny object.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“My high numbers were test scores, the low numbers and zeros: homework. Because my brain stores random unimportant bits of information like the stellar news that the capital of Sri Lanka is Colombo, but it doesn’t seem to have room for the knowledge of what homework assignment is due. The brain wants what it wants.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“It was killing me to think that there was a right and a wrong thing to do. Right for Abelard was wrong for me, and wrong for Abelard was right for me. And nothing made sense except that love is sacrifice and pain.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“You're not going to work at McDonald's." Abelard resumed shaking his head from side to side. A tic--or maybe a world of no. I didn't know.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“You never should have failed this project,"she whispered. "Total bullshit."
Mom never swears unless she's really angry. Guess she was that angry.
She picked up my Populations in Peril project and my paper and left. I watched her go, wondering why she wasn't this much of a badass all the time.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“Abelard had on Wayfarer sunglasses, a dark blue windbreaker over a blue striped shirt, like he was on his way to a casual day of yachting. He looked cool and collected. The very opposite of me.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“Anytime I got too happy, I could just assume something fragile and lovely was lying in wait, ready to shower my world in glass fragments and sticky lemon slices.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“I love it when you speak computationally," I texted. "It makes me want to slap on a lab coat and get to work."
Abelard didn't text me back.
"Abelard?"
"I'm sorry," he texted. "I was distracted by the thought of you only wearing a white lab coat. I believe it is possible that you are the best girlfriend in the history of girlfriends."
"I do my best." My best. It's not often that I get to say these words.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“I'd spent my entire life as a teacup with a jagged crack running down the side, an imperfect vessel threatening to spill my contents onto the table at any random moment. Tolerated but not adored. It didn't seem like it would be even possible to love me. Probabilistically unlikely at best. But for Abelard, the jagged crack was the interesting thing about me.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“I was tired of concealing the truth from everyone. I was tired of keeping the loneliness and sadness inside my head.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“Love is about being broken beyond repair in the eyes of the world and finding someone who thinks you're just fine, that you are special and precious because you understand how it feels to be broken and you have a real human heart.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“Happy. It's the stupidest word in the English language. It's a sprinkles-on-your-ice-cream, My-Little-Pony kind of a word, and yet we are all expected to be happy about everything, including that which makes us miserable, like school.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“Maybe a best friend is someone you run toward when you are running away from everything else.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“I'm learning that my brain will invent catastrophic scenarios that bear absolutely no relationship to reality because, like Heloise, I am too much accustomed to misfortune to expect any happy turn.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“This is the plot up to the moment when the writer leaves the woman still dolefully enmeshed in it, and, suitcase in hand, tiptoeing so as not to disturb her postcoital rest, he himself slips silently out of the plot on the grounds of its general implausibility, a total lack of gravity, reliance at too many key points on unlikely coincidence, an absence of inner coherence, and not even the most tenuous evidence of anything resembling a serious meaning or purpose. The story so far is frivolously plotted, overplotted, for his taste altogether too freakishly plotted, with outlandish events so wildly careening around every corner that there is nowhere for intelligence to establish a foothold and develop a perspective. As if the look-alike at the story's storm center isn't farfetched enough, there is the capricious loss of the Smilesburger check (there is the fortuitous appearance of the Smilesburger check; there is Louis B. Smilesburger himself, Borscht Belt deus ex machina), which sets the action on its unconvincing course and serves to reinforce the writer's sense that the story has been intentionally conceived as a prank, and a nasty prank at that, considering the struggles of Jewish existence that are said to be at issue by his antagonist.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Operation Shylock: A Confession
“a job shortly after the two were sworn in. What Hayes”
― Vince Flynn, quote from Act of Treason
“Four A.M. and the darkness had a quality of inexorability and menace as though it would never lift, as though, without anyone noticing it, the dawn of the day before had been the beginning of the last light ever in the history of the world.”
― Anna Quindlen, quote from Blessings
“They were a pair of people with no middle ground, nothing between polite formalities and an engulfing intimacy”
― Alice Munro, quote from Runaway
“I suppose a better sister would have set about weaving him a shirt from nettles and throwing it over his furred-over body so that he could be released from his enchantment and resume his human form. I give him some cat food instead.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Human Croquet
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