Kendall Kulper · 384 pages
Rating: (2.7K votes)
“The sky would be clear, colorless, mist blending together the air and the ocean, the waves whispering against the rocks.”
“The ocean turns cold, dark, pressing around me, but the deeper I go the more the iron inside of me twists and pulls and I know that I’m tethered to the boat, that even now the men pull the rope tighter and drag me back to the surface.”
“I am swimming and it is just sunrise, the sky so gray as to be almost invisible. I rise to the surface to breathe and that’s when I see the dark shadow of a boat, gliding gently toward me in the water. Men ride in the boat, their faces grim and greedy and silent, and as I turn to watch them I feel a bite in my side, a piercing pain.”
“Cursed, I was cursed, and my mother said she’d given up magic for good, said it was a terrible thing, but she wasn’t above using it to keep me at her side, and she’s a hypocrite, a liar, a fraud and phony, and I hate her I hate her I hate her!”
“I was sixteen, still my mother’s prisoner, the night I became the whale.”
“I stretched out on the carpet, eyes glazed over, my heart whirring with frustration and fear, and as my mother’s curse slowly, firmly, pushed my eyelids closed, my body went still. But on the inside I was screaming.”
“Just because it's common doesn't make it less powerful.”
“This will be the night I escape. The thought repeated in my mind like a refrain, over and over, and I believed it so hard that I whispered it aloud: ‘This will be the night I escape!”
“Panic reared up through me, hot and blazing and blurry, and that was it.”
“Guys hate anticipation. That’s why we all write about satisfaction. Why we never wrap presents. I notice you wrapped mine.”
“I thought it was because you’re all too cheap to buy wrapping paper. Or too clueless to find it in the store.”
“There’s that. But honestly, you go to the trouble of getting someone a present, something you think they’d like—why hide it and make them work for it? It’s coy.”
“never feel guilty for starting again”
“He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.”
“I sit in meditation…and soon all sounds, and all one sees and feels, take on imminence, an immanence, as if the Universe were coming to attention, a Universe of which one is the center, a Universe that is not the same yet not different from oneself: within man as within mountains there are many parts of hydrogen and oxygen, of calcium, phosphorus, potassium, and other elements. ‘You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars…’(Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditation)
The secret of the mountains is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no ‘meaning,’ they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share.”
“Salim,' She said, as if he were in the room. 'I'll have your guts for garters.' I has never heard this before and wondered what garters were. Kat told me later that they are what women used to wear around their thighs to keep their stockings up and they were elasticated. I do not think guts would be a tidy way of doing this.”
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