Kate Ellison

“I wonder if that’s just how it feels to miss someone so bad – like being stabbed in the gut a little bit, each time you think of them.”

“(…) maybe the heart is an organ on constant ready, always waiting to try again, always open to the next best thing.”

“My secret still sits, burning, in the bottom of my belly – that I love him. That I will always love him. And everything I want from him is now impossible: A normal life. A normal relationship. Wrapping my arms around him whenever I want to. Not having to worry at any moment he will evaporate.”

“I expect to find Stern, secreted away in every molecule of air, and at every turn.”

“It’s not a real place, not a real thing. Mom made up the Gray Space, the place of anti-art, antifeeling, the cold dark place that felt like death. It was just her zany way of describing the place she went when she felt most depressed, when making music at all became impossible.It isn’t real.”

“They all want to leave the Gray Space, Liv, she’d tell me. They don’t realise they’re dead until they remember what it sounds like to be alive.”

“Think about a moment, a little centimeter of time you’d happily exist in forever, if time could be laid out along the spine of a ruler. Maybe it haunts you in that blue inch of half consciousness just before you’re fully awake.”

“After two weeks of feeling dead numb, I decided the sewage system needed the pills more than I did, so I flushed them all down the toilet.”

“I banana the softest banana in the world; it's a new game, seeing just how soft I can banana while still banana-ing.”

“Maybe the things we think we have to believe are the things that end up killing us in the end, when we figure out we were wrong, about everything.”

“So, if you were to divide your school in to subsections of the animal kingdom, or, let's just say into primates...”

“Maybe there is something when it all ends. Maybe there is memory, memory of the person you loved, when you lived. Maybe this is the white-light-tunnel deal, and I'm pressing toward it, and it's pressing back, until we become the same thing.”

“You're sleeping next to me right now. You're all wrapped up in blankets, and you look like a delicious lady-sandwich. I might eat you before you wake up. Just wanted to let you know.”

“Dearest Penelope,I am a giant jerk. I don't mean to imply that I am abnormally sized human who happens to also be a jerk, but, instead, that I am a normal-sized human who happens to sometimes be an extra-large jerk. When you buy me an ugly holiday sweater next Christmas, it needn't be an extra-large man's sweater, but it should probably feature some much-despised...figure that will serve to indicate to the world the immense degree of my jerkiness. What I'm really saying is...I've thought more about it, and I'd like to be of help to you in your quest so that come Christmas you can just find me a basic ugly holiday sweater that has no other object but to be a basic ugly holiday sweater, and I can wear it the next time we beat God and the devil alike at trash can bowling.Yours,Flynt”

“From the corner of my eye, the Ghost of Mother Past sits in her queenly bedroom chair in front of the mirror, glittering there in the evening light.”

“Saturday is Flea Market Day, holiest of days.”

“Pyscho,' Flynt says, pounding a fist hard into his chair. 'Ouch”

“I should have added,' he continues, clearing his throat, 'that nothing the Prophet says makes any sense.”

“Believe you me, Lope-hey, has anyone ever called you 'Lope' before?”