Quotes from What She Left Behind

Tracy Bilen ·  236 pages

Rating: (2.1K votes)


“And my stupid stupid heart will never stop loving you”
― Tracy Bilen, quote from What She Left Behind


“Jay: Looks like you misspelled the Treaty of Versailles.
Sara: Yeah, well. My brother's natural ability for languages didn't rub off on me.
Jay: ...I'm not talking about Versailles. I have no idea if you spelled that right. I'm talking about the word 'treaty.”
― Tracy Bilen, quote from What She Left Behind


“I'm fine. If he believes it, he`s a moron.”
― Tracy Bilen, quote from What She Left Behind


“No father should have to bury his son.
No daughter should have to do what I've done.”
― Tracy Bilen, quote from What She Left Behind


“...about as noticeable as a hippo in a flower garden.”
― Tracy Bilen, quote from What She Left Behind



“Sara, we have to go," she whispers, even though my dad isn't there to hear her. She's not crying. She's calm. Matter-of-fact. As if she's asking me whether I want mayo or mustard on my sandwich. Except in secret.”
― Tracy Bilen, quote from What She Left Behind


“He made my mom call and tell Maureen I wouldn't be in to see her anymore. He said therapy is a waste of money. He also told her to upgrade the cable service and to order him a subscription to Military History magazine. The he went and bought a new fishing pole for Matt, who is dead.”
― Tracy Bilen, quote from What She Left Behind


“I stared, like always. A tree in the Petrified Forest. I looked down at my hands and feet and ordered them to move, only they wouldn’t.”
― Tracy Bilen, quote from What She Left Behind


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About the author

Tracy Bilen
Born place: in The United States
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“The baby's large eyes settled on him, and though this has been one of his happiest nights in his whole life, it made him melancholy. He had read somewhere that babies are instinctively drawn to faces, that they will fixate even on drawings or abstract, facelike shapes, and round objects with markings that might resemble eye-mouth-nose. It was information that struck him as terribly sad, terribly lonely - to imagine the infants of the world scoping the blurry atmosphere above them for faces the way primitive people scrutinized the stars for patterns, the way castaways stare at the moon, the blinking of a satellite. It made him sad to think of the baby gathering information - a mind, a soul, slowly solidifying around these impressions, coming to understand cause and effect, coming out of a blank or fog into reality. Into a reality. The true terror, Jonah thought, the true mystery of life was not that we are all going to die, but that we were all born, that we were all once little babies like this, unknowing and slowly reeling in the world, gathering it loop by loop like a ball of string. The true terror was that we once didn't exist and then, through no fault of our own, we had to.”
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“Ceil moaned. Mattie rocked. Propelled by the sound, Mattie rocked her out of that bed, out of that room, into a blue vastness just underneath the sun and above time. She rocked her over Aegean seas so clean they shine like crystal, so clear the fresh blood of sacrificed babies torn from their mothers arms and given to Neptune could be seen like pink froth on the water. She rocked her on and on, past Dachau, where soul-gutted Jewish mothers swept their children's entrails off laboratory floors. They flew past the spilled brains of Senegalese infants whose mothers had dashed them on the wooden sides of slave ships. And she rocked on.
She rocked her into her childhood and let her see murdered dreams. And she rocked her back, back into the womb, to the nadir of her hurt, and they found it-a slight silver splinter, embedded just below the surface of her skin. And Mattie rocked and pulled-and the splinter gave way, but its roots were deep, gigantic, ragged, and they tore up flesh with bits of fat and muscle tissue clinging to them. They left a huge hole, which was already starting to pus over, but Mattie was satisfied. It would heal.”
― Gloria Naylor, quote from The Women of Brewster Place


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