Elizabeth Brundage

“Mrs. Heath wanted to sprinkle their minds with grass seed and watch the blades spike up through the earth, flat and predictable as a golf course. She wanted dependable students, well fed but not necessarily nourished. But he was not in that category. Admittedly, he could not count on his perceptions of letters and words, and he was not always accurate. He misused words most when he liked their sound. A sentence had a kind of music, and the word sounded right. The definitions were never as interesting as the sound they made coming out of your mouth. He rolled their flavors around on his tongue, tasting every nook and cranny, but he could not be trusted to deliver the right answer and she would never give him better than a C, no matter what genius work he produced. The way he saw it, his mind was a big unruly field of wildflowers. One day he would shower the world with blossoms.”

“Awkward interests me, he said. At least when you are feeling awkward you are always thinking. When you are feeling fabulous, for example, rare occurrence that it may be, you stop thinking altogether. Which gets you into all kinds of trouble. Hence, you are for the better off feeling awkward. Just the sound of it on your tongue. Like chewing on screws.”

“He wanted to dig a hole and put the past inside it and cover it back up again. He didn't know if flowers would grow there or not. He hoped they would.”

“Just the word beautiful was seductive - but what did it really mean? Beauty was a soft word that ached with possibility, pliant as dough. You could not presume to define it, she realized, because the very idea of beauty and all it represented was a subjective thing - in the eye of the beholder - but that wasn't really true anymore.”

“Let me tell you about love. Love is a kind of madness and you would follow it anywhere, you don't care.”

“Attraction is composed of desire and danger.”