Quotes from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“The next morning, beer and I mutually decided our relationship wasn’t going to work out.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“I sighed, a deep and heavy sigh. If only sighs could carry all my troubles away.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“I wondered if somehow, without my knowing it, I had been cast in a Lifetime channel movie.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“...with the company of just myself, my thoughts presented themselves like unwelcome houseguests.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“Why I waited until the last days of my life to feel pampered and beautiful. People tell themselves there’s plenty of time to do it all, but most of the time they never see death coming.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“Most of the time I paid it no mind. I kept to myself and everyone in my town of Henryetta liked it that way. While my grandma saw helpful information such as droughts and locust infestations, I was cursed with seeing useless and mundane things like Mrs. White’s toilet overflow or the ear infection in Jenny Baxter’s baby. None of that would be so bad if I kept what I saw to myself, but my visions didn't work that way. Without any volition of my own, whatever I saw just blurted right out of my mouth. Most of the people who knew me thought I was a snoop or a gossip, the only rational explanation to reason away my knowledge. But Momma had another opinion. She declared me demon-possessed.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“I was paving the highway to hell in beet bottles and kisses.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“Trust was a tricky thing. Usually the perosn asking for the trust had to prove they were worthy to receive it.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“I find myself thinking about her all the time. But I hurt her. I didn’t mean to hurt her. I’d do anything to take back the pain I caused, but I don’t think she’ll listen to me. So the only thing I know to do is start over, then maybe she’ll give me another chance.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“he wasn’t who I thought he was.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“It all started when I saw myself dead.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“I raised my eyebrows in surprise. "Are you talking about Agnes Gardner?" I had a sneaking suspicion she was at the wrong visitation.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“But misery is misery, no matter what its cause and we were both drowning in it. I”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“The next morning, beer and I mutually decided our relationship wasn’t going to work out. I wondered why it decided to turn on me as I clung to the toilet, waiting to puke my guts out. Everything had been going so well the night before.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“The dam of tears broke again and I cried softly, grateful for the love I didn’t deserve because the gift of me didn’t seem to be enough.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“what’s wrong with being different? Sometimes it’s good to stand apart from everyone else.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“What that woman said, it wasn't right. Just remember that she doesn’t know you. You can’t change the opinions of small-minded people.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“I fell asleep, lying against his chest listening to the soft beat of his heart in my ear, my own full of joy.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“The next morning, beer and I mutually decided our relationship wasn´t going to work out.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“Gossip in Henryetta spread faster than a smallpox plague in an internment camp.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“I didn't know how many police cars the city of Henryetta owned, but I was willing to bet money all of them were currently parked in front of my house.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“My smile rivaled the width of the Grand Canyon.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“my computer screen. A scruffy man in his mid-thirties”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“the wall in the hallway, watching Violet and her family”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“As the evening went on, I discovered that visitations are all about lying. Momma never looked so good, both physically and in personality, as she did dead. We heard how wonderful, kind, clever, and generous she was, adjectives no one in their right mind would have used a week ago.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“huff. “I need to renew my plates,” he said. Irritation”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

“We walked to the car, side by side, but a million miles apart.”
― Denise Grover Swank, quote from Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

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Popular quotes

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“Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty.”
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“But I don't know how to tell him all this. That I'm scared and I don't know how to be normal. I'm broken, just like him, and I'm not sure I can fix myself.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dark and Hollow Places

“ALONE

One of my new housemates, Stacy, wants to write a story about an astronaut. In his story the astronaut is wearing a suit that keeps him alive by recycling his fluids. In the story the astronaut is working on a space station when an accident takes place, and he is cast into space to orbit the earth, to spend the rest of his life circling the globe. Stacy says this story is how he imagines hell, a place where a person is completely alone, without others and without God. After Stacy told me about his story, I kept seeing it in my mind. I thought about it before I went to sleep at night. I imagined myself looking out my little bubble helmet at blue earth, reaching toward it, closing it between my puffy white space-suit fingers, wondering if my friends were still there. In my imagination I would call to them, yell for them, but the sound would only come back loud within my helmet. Through the years my hair would grow long in my helmet and gather around my forehead and fall across my eyes. Because of my helmet I would not be able to touch my face with my hands to move my hair out of my eyes, so my view of earth, slowly, over the first two years, would dim to only a thin light through a curtain of thatch and beard.
I would lay there in bed thinking about Stacy's story, putting myself out there in the black. And there came a time, in space, when I could not tell whether I was awake or asleep. All my thoughts mingled together because I had no people to remind me what was real and what was not real. I would punch myself in the side to feel pain, and this way I could be relatively sure I was not dreaming. Within ten years I was beginning to breathe heavy through my hair and my beard as they were pressing tough against my face and had begun to curl into my mouth and up my nose. In space, I forgot that I was human. I did not know whether I was a ghost or an apparition or a demon thing.
After I thought about Stacy's story, I lay there in bed and wanted to be touched, wanted to be talked to. I had the terrifying thought that something like that might happen to me. I thought it was just a terrible story, a painful and ugly story. Stacy had delivered as accurate a description of a hell as could be calculated. And what is sad, what is very sad, is that we are proud people, and because we have sensitive egos and so many of us live our lives in front of our televisions, not having to deal with real people who might hurt us or offend us, we float along on our couches like astronauts moving aimlessly through the Milky Way, hardly interacting with other human beings at all.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

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