Eleanor Brown

“Vi har aldri vært velorganiserte lesere som leser en bok helt ut på noen slags logisk måte. Vi bukter oss ut og inn av ord, som turister på en sightseeingbuss man kan hoppe av og på.”

“I stedet kom vi bare til å gjøre det vi bestandig gjorde, det eneste vi noen gang hadde vært oppriktig gode til: Vi kom til å lese.”

“Hun stupte inn i bøkene, etterlignet hver bidige figur hun møtte der. Hun leste en historie om en jente som satt og leste i klesskapet mens hun spiste kjeks med sjokoladebiter i, og da gjorde hun det samme. Hun leste Nancy Drew og Hardyguttene og lette etter ledetråder overalt, skrev dem ned i Harriet spion-notisboka si, selv om hun aldri fikk noe mer ut av dem enn stadig tilbakevendende skuffelser. Hun prøvde å rømme og gjøre som millioner av barn i millioner av bøker, men hun og kofferten med bilde av en liten, gammeldags jente med kysehatt på, kom aldri lenger enn til rododendronbuskene før hun mistet motet.”

“He had the singular ability to knock down her carefully bricked defenses, which was a compliment to them both and the secret to their love.”

“Oh honey, we’re all fuckups in our own special ways.”

“Our parents' love is not some grand passion, there are no swoons of lust, no ball gowns and tuxedos, but here is the truth: they have not spent a night apart since the day they married.How can we ever hope to find a love to live up to that?”

“She had gone from most favored nation to useless ally, from Cordelia to Ophelia.”

“But the truth was, we had failed, and rather than let anyone else know, we crafted careful excuses and alibis, and wrapped them around ourselves like a cloak to keep out the cold truth.”

“August is a teacher's longest Sunday" -Weird Sisters”

“These were the kind [of letters] you save, folded into a memory box, to be opened years later with fingers against crackling age, heart pounding with the sick desire to be possessed by memory.”

“The question to ask is what will satisfy you? What will bring you peace? And perhaps the answer to those is in asking yourself when you were last happy.”

“We think, in some ways, we have all done this our whole lives, searching for the book that will give us the keys to ourselves, let us into a wholly formed personality as though it were a furnished room to let. As though we could walk in and look around and say to the gray-haired landlady behind us, "We'll take it.”

“And the baby would never know what it meant to hate Barnwell so deeply that she couldn't help but return to it.”

“Our estrangement is not drama-laden- we have not betrayed one another's trust, we have not stolen lovers or fought over money or property or any of the things that irreparably break families apart. The answer, for us, is much simpler.See, we love one another. We just don't happen to like one another very much.”

“I have loved this disaster of a library since I was old enough to read.”

“Not me, of course, as I am now officially a spinster librarian and must stay home with my cat and drink tea.”

“What I mean is, I still feel like me. It's not like I wake up and think, I am a responsible adult. I just look in the mirror and see myself. the same stupid person I've been looking at for years.”

“Instead, we'd do what we always did, the only thing we'd ever been dependably stellar at: we'd read.”

“I keep waiting to feel old, to feel like a grown-up, but I don't yet. Do you think that's the big secret adults keep from you? That you never feel like a grown-up?”

“...after our weekly trip to the library, she cleared the top of her dresser and set out her week's reading, stood them on their ends, pages fanned out, sending little puffs of text into the air.”

“The library drew Bean down the street, as it had drawn all of us over the years. Our parents had trained us to become readers, and the town’s library had been the one place, other than church, that we visited every week.”

“There is much made in the psychological literature of the effects of divorce on children, particularly as it comes to their own marriages, lo those many years later. We have always wondered why there is not more research done on the children of happy marriages. Our parents' love is not some grand passion, there are no swoons of lust, no ball gowns and tuxedos, but here is the truth: they have not spent a night apart since the day they married.How can we ever hope to find a love to live up to that?”

“We wear our names heavily. And though we have tried to escape their influence, they have seeped into us, and we find ourselves living their patterns again and again.”

“Forgetting wasn’t the same as being happy. Being drunk wasn’t the same as forgetting … we were at our most miserable when we’re doing it to ourselves.”

“I’m just like this speed bump in the middle, slowing everyone down because I keep fucking up.”

“Bean felt a rush of sweet nostalgia for the woman who had introduced us to E. Nesbit and Edward Eager and Laura Ingalls Wilder...”

“Long ago she had thought bravery equaled wandering, the power was in the journey. Now she knew that, for her, it took no courage to leave; strength came from returning. Strength lay in staying.”

“How old were you when you first realized that your parents were human? That they were not omnipotent, that what they said did not, in fact, go, they had dreams and feelings and scars? Or have you not realized that yet?Do you still call your parents and have a one-sided conversation with them, child to parent, not adult to adult?”

“Sisters keep secrets.Because sisters' secrets are swords.”

“Cordy slept late, awakening only when the noises of the house and the insistent sunlight became to obvious to be believably incorporated into her dreams any longer.”

“The wanderlust crept up again inside her like a shooting star, a sudden, violent urge to escape disappearing into darkness again. She pushed down the afterglow and focused.”

“Here's one of the problems with communicating in the words of a man who is not around to explain himself: it's damn hard sometimes to tell what he was talking about. Look, the sheer fact that people have banged out book after article after dramatic interpretation of this guy should tell you that despite his eloquence, he wasn't the clearest of communicators.”

“There is nothing that is not beautiful about bread. The way it grows, from tiny grains, from bowls on the counter, from yeast blooming in a measuring cup like swampy islands. The way it fills a room, a house, a building, with its inimitable smells, submits to a firmly applied fist and contracts, swells again; the way it stretches and expands upon kneading, the warm, supple feel of it against skin. The sight of a warm roll on a table, the taste-sweet, sour, yeasty on the tongue.”

“There is no problem that a library card can't solve.”

“she wondered how she could have spent all that money and have nothing but clothes and accessories and a long list of men she never wanted to see again to show for it”

“Our destiny is in the way we were born, in the way we were raised, in the sum of the three of us.”

“we all have stories we tell ourselves. We tell ourselves we are too fat, too ugly, or too old, or too foolish. We tell ourselves these stories because they allow us to excuse our actions, and they allow us to pass off the responsibility for things we have done-maybe to something within our control, but anything other than the decisions we have made.”

“Despite his money and his looks and all the good-on-paper attributes he possessed, he was not a reader, and, well, let's just say that is the sort of nonsense up with which we will not put.”

“we came home because we were failures”

“She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. "A few hundred," she said."How do you have the time?" he asked, gobsmacked.She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don't spend hours flipping through cable complaining there's nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in reflective surfaces? I am reading!"I don't know," she said, shrugging.”

“There are times in our lives when we have to realize our past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future.”

“She never managed to find herself in these books no matter how hard she tried, exhuming traits from between the pages and donning them for an hour, a day, a week. We think in some ways, we have all done this our whole lives, searching for the book that will give us the keys to ourselves, let us into a wholly formed personality as though it were a furnished room to let. As though we could walk in and look around and say to the gray-haired landlady behind us, "We'll take it.”

“We were never organized readers who would see a book through to its end in any sory of logical order. We weave in and out of words like tourists on a hop-on, hop-off bus tour. Put a book down in the kitchen to go to the bathroom and you might return to find it gone, replaced by another of equal interest. We are indiscriminate.”

“This conversation, you will not be surprised to know, was the impetus for their breakup, given that it caused her to realize the emotion that she had thought was her not liking him very much was, in fact, her not liking him at all. Because despite his money and his looks and all the good-on-paper attributes he possessed, he was not a reader, and, well, let's just say that is the sort of nonsense up with which we will not put.”