Carol Rifka Brunt Quotes

Greta always wanted to know everything. Every little detail. But I understood. You can ruin anything if you know too much.

Maybe all I wanted was for Toby to hear the wolves that lived in the dark forest of my heart.

Please promise to take the very best care of my only girl. With so much love my heart might split in two ...

Who could resist the two of us all squashed into one beautiful person, right? He smiled.

You can build a whole world around the tiniest of touches.

When I go to the woods now, I always head out along the brook and go straight to the big maple. I run there, like Toby must have done on that stormy night, then I bend down and crawl on the earth. Because what if there's a clue? What if there's a piece of chunky strawberry bubble gum still bundled up in its waxy wrapper, or a weather-faded matchbook, or a fallen button from somebody's big gray coat? What if buried under all those leaves is me? Not this me, but the girl in a Gunne Sax dress with the back zipper open. The girl with the best boots in the world. What if she's under there? What if she's crying? Because she will be, if I find her. Her tears tell the story of what she knows. That the past, present, and future are just one thing. That there's nowhere to go from here. Home is home is home.

There was at least some small beauty in what we'd done.

I wasn't interested in drinking beer or vodka or smoking cigarettes or doing all the other things Greta thinks I can't even imagine. I don't want to imagine those things. Anyone can imagine things like that. I want to imagine wrinkled time, and forests thick with wolves, and bleak midnight moors. I dream about people who don't need to have sex to know they love each other. I dream about people who would only ever kiss you on the cheek.

I'm okay with one or two people, but more than that and I turn into a naked mole rat.

It's hard to do that, to decide to believe one thing over another.

In having a purpose. I could feel it hardening up my bones and thickening my blood. I felt older and smarter than anyone else I knew. I could do anything, anything at all.

I thought how there was a kind of power in being needed. In having a purpose. I could feel it hardening up my bones and thickening my blood.

Don't you see? It's like we've known each other all these years. Without even seeing each other. It's like there's been this ... this ghost relationship between us. You laying out my plectrums on the floor, me buying black-and-white cookies every time I knew you would be coming over. You didn't know that was me, but it was.

I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds, if you want them to be there.

I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.

That's the difference between you and Greta. She has better things to do. She gets involved in clubs, activities. She has friends. But you? You slump around in that room of yours

I told my mother he looked like a deflated balloon. Greta said he looked like a small gray moth wrapped in a spider's web. That's because everything about Greta is more beautiful, even the way she says things.

I go to the movies whenever I get the chance, because the movie theater is like the woods. It's another place that's like a time machine.

I mean, why did sex have to be so important? Why couldn't people live together, spend their whole lives together, just because they liked each other's company? Just because they liked each other more than they liked anyone else in the whole world?
If you found a person like that you wouldn't have to have sex. You could just hold them, couldn't you?

I didn't say anything. Greta always knew how to make me lose my words.

My mother said it was like a cassette tape you could never rewind. But it was hard to remember you couldn't rewind it while you were listening to it. And so you'd forget and fall into the music and listen and then, without you even knowing it, the tape would suddenly end.

Going into the woods alone is the best way to pretend you're in another time. It's a thing you can only do alone. If there's somebody else with you, it's too easy to remember where you really are.

Either you're a falconer or you're not. Either the birds come back to you or they fly away.

Greta knows that for me there are no good parties. I'm okay with one or two people, but more than that and I turn into a naked mole rat. That's what being shy feels like. Like my skin is too thin, the light too bright. Like the best place I could possibly be is in a tunnel far under the cool, dark earth. Someone asks me a question and I stare at them, empty-faced, my brain jammed up with how hard I'm trying to find something interesting to say. And in the end, all I can do is nod or shrug, because the light of their eyes looking at me, waiting for me, is just too much to take. And then it's over and there's one more person in the world who thinks I'm a complete and total waste of space.

I had no idea how greedy my heart really was.

But maybe I am. Maybe that's exactly what I am. Maybe all I wanted was for Toby to hear the wolves that lived in the dark forest of my heart. And maybe that's what it meant. Tell the Wolves I'm Home. Maybe Finn understood everything, as usual. You may as well tell them where you live, because they'll find you anyway. They always do.

I want to imagine wrinkled time, and forests thick with wolves, and bleak midnight moors

The real question for me is why Lieutenant Cable and Nellie didn't just get together. Because they would have been a perfect match. I guess the idea is that opposites attract, but I don't think that's what it's like in real life. I think in real life you'd want someone who was as close to you as possible. Someone who could understand exactly the way you thought.

Watching people is a good hobby, but you have to be careful about it. You can't let people catch you staring at them. If people catch you, they treat you like a first-class criminal. And maybe they're right to do that. Maybe it should be a crime to try to see things about people they don't want you to see.

I don't like to overhear things, because, in my experience, things your parents are keeping quiet about are things you don't want to know.

After a snowstorm is the best time to be in the woods, because all the empty beer and soda cans and candy wrappers disappear, and you don't have to try as hard to be in another time. Plus there's just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on.

The day my mother gave us the keys, she also made me and Greta sign a form so that the bank knew our signatures. To get in we had to show our key and sign something so they would know it was really us. I was worried that my signature wouldn't look the same. I wasn't sure when that thing would happen that made it so you always signed your name exactly the same, but it hadn't happened to me yet. So far I'd only had to sign something three times. Once for a code of conduct for the eighth grade field trip to Philadelphia, once for a pact I made with Beans and Frances Wykoski in fifth grade that we'd never have boyfriends until high school. (Of the three of us, I'm the only one who kept that pact.)

I stared at Greta's back. At her matted hair, decorated with brown torn leaves and dirt. What was happening to my sister? What if I'd never come? How long would she have stayed hidden in those cool, damp leaves? How long before she woke up alone and scared, with nothing but the howling of wolves to keep her company?

I only need one good friend to see me through. Most people aren't like that. Most people are always looking out for more people to know.

There are dark black buttons tattooed on my heart. I'll carry them for the rest of my days.

There was a flicker of something in Greta's look. I couldn't tell whether it was a flicker of love or regret or meanness.

Then, who is Matilda?' I asked.
Toby tilted his cup and poked at the slush with his straw. 'I suppose Matilda's the girl who felt like home.

Toby was right. Finn was my first love. But Toby, he was my second. And the sadness in that stretched like a thin cold river down the length of my whole life.

But it's my face. Mine and Greta's. We don't belong to everybody.

That's what being shy feels like. Like my skin is too thin, the light too bright. Like the best place I could possibly be is in a tunnel far under the cool, dark earth. Someone asks me a question and I stare at them, empty-faced, my brain jammed up with how hard I'm trying to find something interesting to say. And in the end, all I can do is nod or shrug, because the light of their eyes looking at me, waiting for me, is just too much to take. And then it's over and there's one more person in the world who thinks I'm a complete and total waste of space.
The worst thing is the stupid hopefulness. Every new party, every new bunch of people, and I start thinking that maybe this is my chance. That I'm going to be normal this time. A new leaf. A fresh start. But then I find myself at the party, thinking, Oh, yeah. This again.
So I stand on the edge of things, crossing my fingers, praying nobody will try to look me in the eye. And the good thing is, they usually don't.

What if you ended up in the wrong kind of love? What if you accidentally ended up in the falling kind with someone it would be so gross to fall in love with that you could never tell anyone in the world about it? The kind you'd have to crush down so deep inside yourself that it almost turned your heart into a black hole? The kind you squashed deeper and deeper down, but no matter how much you hoped it would suffocate, it never did? Instead, it seemed to inflate, to grow gigantic as time went by, filling every little spare space you had until it was you. You were it. Until everything you ever saw or thought led you back to one person. The person you weren't supposed to love that way.

None of those things should have mattered, but I guess they did. I guess they were like water. Soft and harmless until enough time went by. Then all of a sudden you found yourself with the Grand Canyon on your hands.

For a long time, all the way through to the end of elementary school, Beans was my only friend. Because that's how I've always been. I only need one good friend to see me through. Most people aren't like that. Most people are always looking out for more people to know. In the end, Beans was like most people. After a while she had dozens of friends, and by fifth grade it was pretty obvious that even though she was my best friend, I wasn't hers.

You could just hold them, couldn't you? You could sit close to them, nestle into them so you could hear the machine of them churning away. You could press your ear against that person's back, listening to the rhythm of them, knowing that you were both made of the same exact stuff. You could do things like that.

It was a nice thing for her to say. In her way. With Greta you have to look out for the nice things buried in the rest of her mean stuff. Greta's talk is like a geode. Ugly as anything on the outside and for the most part the same on the inside, but every once in a while there's something that shines through.

There was something so electric about it. So dangerous. Those little touches were everything. I lived fro them. You can build a whole world around the tiniest of touches. Did you know that? Can you imagine? - Tobias Aldshaw

Why, June, you sound surprised. He'd put on an offended-housewife voice, but it was in a hoarse whisper, so it sounded like an offended housewife who smoked five packs of cigarettes a day. I laughed.

All my parents' music came from greatest hits albums. It was like the thought of getting even one bum track was too much for them to handle.

You could try to believe what you wanted, but it never worked. Your brain and your heart decided what you were going to believe and that was that. Whether you liked it or not.

You think I don't know about wrong love, June? You think I don't understand embarrassing love?

Yeah, okay. I'll drop it, I said, and although I held it back with every muscle in my body, what I really wanted to do was cry. Not only because Finn had never told me about this guy, but because there was no way to ask him about it. And until then I don't think I really understood the meaning of gone.

The kinds of things I want don't cost money.

when it's only you and your sister, you can do any embarrassing thing you want.

She was wired into my heart. Twisted and kinked and threaded right through.

Until the last light faded. Until the space between the tree branches and the branches themselves became the same dark thing.

If things went my way, I would be working at a renaissance fair as a falconer. I wouldn't have to worry about climbing career ladders or getting promotions, because falconry's not like that. Either you're a falconer or you're not. Either the birds come back to you or they fly away. My father waited

Things you'd never even seen with Finn could remind you of him, because he was the one person you'd want to show. "Look at that," you'd want to say, because you knew he would find a way to think it was wonderful. To make you feel like the most observant person in the world for spotting it.

Don't you know? That's the secret. If you always make sure you're exactly the person you hoped to be, if you always make sure you know only the best people, then you won't care if you die tomorrow." "That doesn't make any sense. If you were so happy, then you'd want to stay alive, wouldn't you? You'd want to be alive forever, so you could keep being happy." ...
"No, no. It's the most unhappy people who want to stay alive, because they think they haven't done everything they want to do. They think they haven't had enough time. They feel like they've been shortchanged.

I know all about love that's too big to stay in a tiny bucket. Splashing out all over the place in the most embarrassing way possible.

You can't keep friends if you always say no to things.

There was something so lonely about that moment, everyone around me completely involved in this thing I wasn't a part of, me with nowhere to go.

How do you become someone with X-ray vision?

I like the word clandestine. It feels medieval. Sometimes I think of words as being alive. If clandestine were alive, it would be a pale little girl with hair the color of fall leaves and a dress as white as the moon.

Hm-hm-hm, his laugh went. Like he'd swallowed the sun.

I dream about people who don't need to have sex to know they love each other.

Maybe you had to be dying to finally get to do what you wanted.
I fidgeted around with the puzzle pieces for a while longer, but I wasn't lucky. Nothing seemed to fit without a whole lot of work.
Then I had this thought: What if it was enough to realize that you would die someday, that none of this would go on forever? Would that be enough?

I knew the way lost hopes could be dangerous, how they could turn a person into someone they never thought they'd be.

The sun kept on with its slipping away, and I thought how many small good things in the world might be resting on the shoulders of something terrible.

I thought how that was wrong and terrible and beautiful all at the same time.

... there's just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on. It makes you believe you're special, even though you know you're not.

If you think a story can be like a kind of cement, the sloppy kind that you put between bricks, the kind that looks like cake frosting before it dries hard, then maybe I thought it would be possible to use what Toby had to hold Finn together, to keep him here with me a little bit longer.

I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn't like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size. You were a boy, and already it was certain you wouldn't be a mother and it was likely you wouldn't become a manicurist or a kindergarten teacher. Then you started to grow up and everything you did closed the tunnel in some more. You broke your arm climbing a tree and you ruled out being a baseball pitcher. You failed every math test you ever took and you canceled any hope of being a scientist. Like that. On and on through the years until you were stuck. You'd become a baker or a librarian or a bartender. Or an accountant. And there you were. I figured that on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you'd have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed.

I thought of trying to catch her eye, so she'd know I understood what she'd done, but I decided not to. Everyone needs to think they have secrets.

Sometimes it feels good to take the long way home.

What's the one superpower of June Elbus?"
I thought about myself from head to toe. It was like being forced to read the most boring part of the Sears catalog. Like leafing through the bathroom accessories pages. Boring brain. Boring face. No sex appeal. Clumsy hands.
"Heart. Hard heart," I said, not sure where it came from. "The hardest heart in the world."
"Hmmm," Toby said, tapping a finger in the air. "That's a useful one, you know. Very handy. The question is ... " Toby paused like he was considering this all very seriously.
"What's the question?"
"The question is, stone or ice? Crack or melt?

When people mentioned it to me, they thought they were talking about some casual relative of mine. For most people that's what an uncle was. They had no idea how I felt about Finn. No idea that hearing them talk about AIDS, like that was the important part of the story
more important than who Finn was, or how much I loved him, or how much he was still breaking my heart every single hour of every single day
made me want to scream.

That's one of those snapshot moments. I don't know why some memories are like that, where everything is perfectly preserved. Frozen.

My mother gave me a disappointed look. Then I gave her one back. Mine was for everything, not just the sandwich.

The walls of the tunnels were covered with so much dirt, it was almost like fur. I thought those tunnels were the kind of places wolves might live. I thought they were like the vessels of the human heart.

That's different, I said. And it was. A portrait is a picture where somebody gets to choose what you look like. How they want to see you. A camera catches whichever you happens to be there when it clicks.

Then we left, just me running with my sister, the wolves at our backs.

Maybe when you're dead you can crawl inside other people and make them nicer than they were before.

Maybe it's just that people didn't know everything then. There were things people had never seen before. Places nobody had ever been. You could make up a story and people would believe it. You could believe in dragons and saints. You could look around at plants and think that maybe they could save your life.

I sat on a bench and my mother stood in front of me, looking down the track. Her hair was cut short, and because it had all turned gray when she was twenty-three, she always had it dyed a deep chestnut brown. It was that color all over except for a super thin stripe at the top of her head, where the gray showed through. Sometimes I wanted to touch that place on my mother's head, that thin crack where her real self had forced its way through.

I felt the wall between the world of secrets and the real world start to collapse. I felt the girls from the portrait becoming us and us becoming them ...

Finn said art isn't about drawing or painting a perfect bowl of fruit. It's about ideas. And you, he said, have enough good ideas to last a lifetime.

As the elevator door started to close, she stood and put up one hand to wave goodbye. That's one of those frozen memories for me, because there was something in Greta's solemn wave that made me understand it was about something bigger. That as the elevator door eclipsed the look between us, we were really saying goodbye to the girls we used to be. Girls who knew how to play invisible mermaids, who could run through dark aisles, pretending to save the world.

As you head into adulthood, June, you may occasionally encounter oversize exotic beverages of an alcoholic nature. I felt it was my duty to acquaint you with these potentially hazardous drinks.

But if they loved each other so much, couldn't they talk it out?"
Toby gave an exasperated laugh. "You get into habits. Ways of being with certain people.

I ... Why do you want me to?"
There was a flicker of something in Greta's look. I couldn't tell whether it was a flicker of love or regret or meanness, and then she said, "Why wouldn't I want you to?"
Because you hate me, I thought, but I didn't say it.

Once you know a thing you can't ever unknow it.

And I suddenly understood that getting drunk was just one more way to leave this place, this time.

You don't need sex for that kind of thing to happen. For your body to forget how to tell if it's hungry or not. For you to mistake someone else's hunger for your own.

Sometimes I wondered if I might go through my whole life looking for someone who came even a little bit close

Black holes aren't an Earth Science topic, but Mr. Zerbiak is like that. One minute Adam Bell was asking a question about a meteoroid he found in his backyard, and the next Mr. Zerbiak was saying that he was "going a little off topic here, but ... " and of course everyone was suddnely all interested. If teachers pretended that everything they said was "off topic", we'd have a whole school full of straight-A students.

The bed was warm and ordinary and perfect, and it had been such a long, long day. Probably the longest day of my life. I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds,