“I wanted to tell her that I loved her, and not in the complicated way I loved our parents, but in a simple way I never had to think about. I loved her like breathing.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“Do you really want to know where we come from?" she said. "In every century, in every country, they'll call us something different. They'll say we're ghosts, angels, demons, elemental spirits, and giving us a name doesn't help anybody. When did a name change what someone is?”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“Sometimes this was just the way the game ended. Sometimes you did your best, and it all went straight to hell anyway.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“Intention is one of the most powerful forces there is. What you mean when you do a thing will always determine the outcome. The law creates the world.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“The simple truth is that you can understand the way you are. You can know and love and hate it. You can blame it, resent it, and nothing changes. In the end, you're just a part of it.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“I wanted it in the way you sometimes want to jump into very cold water, even though you know it won't feel good. I wanted to go numb. To see what it felt like to be someone else.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“The Cutter leaned toward me, resting his forehead against mine. 'Fool me once,' he whispered, 'shame on you.' He pressed the bridge of his nose against mine, his breath burning the back of my throat. His voice was rough and furious. 'Fool me twice, and I will cut out your fucking throat.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“I'm not normal, Tate."
"I know." Her hand was working its way under my shirt, then touching my skin, sliding over my chest and stomach. "Does this feel good?"
I closed my eyes and nodded.
"You're normal enough.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“All great acts are ruled by intention. What you mean is what you get.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“Goodbye," she said.
When I didn't say it back, she rested her hand on the top of my head. The weight was strange and gentle. "I love you," she said. "And when I tell you goodbye, I don't mean forever or for long. Just that I'm going home now, and so are you.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“They?" he said, sounding apprehensive.
"Me. They're like me."
"Don't be a jackass," Roswell said, but not meanly. "No one's like you.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“When did a name ever change what someone is?”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“You're terribly selfish, you know. I've loved you so long, and it was never dear or precious to you. I might as well have not loved you at all.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“All I want is for you to stand here and watch the people you love be horribly mutilated. Is that too much to ask?”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“What's wrong?" His voice was loud, so sharp that he sounded angry.
I knew I should be careful, keep the secret, but I was too far gone to talk around it. My chest was working in huge spasms and I could barely breathe. "I kissed her."
"And then you went into anaphylactic shock?"
I closed my eyes and let the rain patter against my face through the open window "She has her tongue pierced.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“We lay on the grass beside the cemetery fence, kissing and shivering. Her teeth started to chatter and I pulled her against me, which made me feel like a superhero for no apparent reason.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“When he was done adding sloe gin and grenadine, Danny shoved the glass across the counter to Drew. "Try that and tell me what it needs."
Drew took a sip, then coughed and set the glass down. "That's awful."
Danny scowled and tossed a dripping tablespoon at him. "You're awful. I'm looking for constructive feedback, asshole. What does it need?"
Drew threw the tablespoon back. "It needs to be taken out and shot."
"Make your own damn drink, Mr. Mixology.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“Is it hypocritical to love a person and still find fault with their actions?"
-The Morrigan”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“Her voice was like loneliness. It was regret. She sang about a past you couldn't get out of and didn't want.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“Their lead guitar sounded like what would happen if someone wedged a traffic accident into a blender.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“Why does she always seem to think you drive like we're holding up a bank?"
Roswell grinned and rolled his eyes, "Because that's what teenagers do, right? They also carve swastikas into their arms, steal prescription drugs from old people, and freebase cocaine. I need to institute a policy where she stops watching 60 Minutes and pretty much all public service announcements.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“You presume to name those who have no name. We are pandemonium and disaster. We are the dancing, gibbering horror of the world.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“Our lives were limitless and unknowable, not perfect, but ours.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“She was the purest, biggest truth.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“I looked at the ground and the dark, drizzling sky and pretty much anyplace that wasn't her. "I like you. A lot." When I finally glanced at her, my face was hot and it was hard to keep looking.
She squinted up at me. Then she crossed her arms. "This is a really inappropriate place to be having this conversation."
"I know. I like you anyway."
Saying it a third time was like breaking some kind of spell. Her face went soft and far away.
"Don't say that unless you mean it."
"I don't say anything I don't mean.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“Take your necklace off."
"Why?"
"Because if you don't, I can't kiss you.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“It wasn't like the other songs. There was no story, no conversation. This was just the feeling, without words or pictures, and it had nothing to do with Luther or his clean, stinging guitar. It was the sound of being outside, of being alien. It was the pulse that ran under everything and never let you forget that you were strange, that the world hurt just to touch.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“We're literal people, you and me. Whatever the most obvious interpretation is, that's our truth.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“It was completely unshocking that there were monsters in the world, secret
rituals and underground burrows filled with the dead, when in my own way, I was secret and sort of monstrous too. It just didn’t show in the same way.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“I didn't know how to respond to that. There was something disturbing about being responsible for partially decayed girls going swimming.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
Brenna Yovanoff
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“You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out.Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room.
Grandma Lynn died several years later, but I have yet to see her here. I imagine her tying it on in her heaven, drinking mint juleps with Tennessee Williams and Dean Martin. She'll be here in her own sweet time, I'm sure.
If I'm to be honest with you, I still sneak away to watch my family sometimes. I can't help it, and sometimes they still think of me. They can't help it....
It was a suprise to everyone when Lindsey found out she was pregnant...My father dreamed that one day he might teach another child to love ships in bottles. He knew there would be both sadness and joy in it; that it would always hold an echo of me.
I would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe. But this heaven is not about safety just as, in its graciousness, it isn't about gritty reality. We have fun.
We do things that leave humans stumped and grateful, like Buckley's garden coming up one year, all of its crazy jumble of plants blooming all at once. I did that for my mother who, having stayed, found herself facing the yard again. Marvel was what she did at all the flowers and herbs and budding weeds. Marveling was what she mostly did after she came back- at the twists life took.
And my parents gave my leftover possessions to the Goodwill, along with Grandma Lynn's things.
They kept sharing when they felt me. Being together, thinking and talking about the dead, became a perfectly normal part of their life. And I listened to my brother, Buckley, as he beat the drums.
Ray became Dr. Singh... And he had more and more moments that he chose not to disbelieve. Even if surrounding him were the serious surgeons and scientists who ruled over a world of black and white, he maintained this possibility: that the ushering strangers that sometimes appeared to the dying were not the results of strokes, that he had called Ruth by my name, and that he had, indeed, made love to me.
If he ever doubted, he called Ruth. Ruth, who graduated from a closet to a closet-sized studio on the Lower East Side. Ruth, who was still trying to find a way to write down whom she saw and what she had experienced. Ruth, who wanted everyone to believe what she knew: that the dead truly talk to us, that in the air between the living, spirits bob and weave and laugh with us. They are the oxygen we breathe.
Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort.
So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish. This wide wide Heaven is about flathead nails and the soft down of new leaves, wide roller coaster rides and escaped marbles that fall then hang then take you somewhere you could never have imagined in your small-heaven dreams.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Lovely Bones
“Life is not a song, sweetling.
Someday you may learn that, to your sorrow.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones
“What if it lines up like it did in the Trojan War ... Athena versus Poseidon?"
"I don't know. But I just know that I'll be fighting next to you."
"Why?"
"Because you're my friend, Seaweed Brain. Any more stupid questions?”
― Rick Riordan, quote from The Lightning Thief
“Oh, please don't go—we'll eat you up—we love you so!”
― Maurice Sendak, quote from Where the Wild Things Are
“If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?”
― Yann Martel, quote from Life of Pi
The Reckoning
When the Wind Blows
Sins of the Night
Where Things Come Ba...
The Transfer
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