Tess Callahan

“It hurts not because she is a failure, but because he finally sees so.”

“This is what I think. Addiction is just a way of trying to get at something else. Something bigger. Call it transcendence if you want, but it's a fucked-up way, like a rat in a maze. We all want the same thing. We all have this hole. The thing you want offers relief, but it's a trap.”

“He was so close she could almost hear the movement of his thoughts, the role of the tide; she had slipped inside his skin.”

“Remember him, April. Even when you can’t picture his face anymore, you owe each other prayers. And I’m not talking about sappy, sentimental stuff. Or fantasy, either. You pray for the hardest moments in his life, years down the line, when he’s in a foxhole, or his child is sick, or he finds he has cancer. No one escapes calamity, but a kiss like that can last you your whole life. She looks up at April. I’m not saying that you think about it all the time. It just leaves you different than it found you.”

“I'm not saying that you think about it all the time. It just leaves you different than it found you.”

“All your life you're yellow. Then one day you brush up against something blue, the barest touch, and voila, the rest of your life you're green.”

“Because we're all rainbow-colored inside, each of us a different arrangement, of course. The kiss just makes all the colors more concentrated, so intense they can be hard to look at. Or feel, rather. Like a Mediterranean sunset.”

“Infatuation burns itself out,' she says. 'Friendship mixed with old chemistry--that can last a lifetime.”

“It's like this," Nana says. "All your life you're yellow. Then one day you brush up against something blue, the barest touch, and voila, the rest of your life you're green.”