Emily M. Danforth Quotes

Adam kept sneering, near a shout now. Yeah, well what about saving him from right now? What about the hell of thinking it's best just to fucking chop your balls off than to have your body somehow betray your stupid fucking belief system?

I felt like I needed something official to show me how all of this should feel, how I should be acting, what I should be saying
even if it was just some dumb movie that wasn't really official at all.

Yeah," I said, "Whatever." I didn't want to talk anymore about what had just happened; I hated that about Promise. Why couldn't a moment just happen, and both of us be aware of it, without having to comment on it forever and ever?

My whole point," I said, "is that what they teach here, what they believe, if you don't trust it, if you doubt it at all, then you're told that you're going to hell, that not only everyone you know is ashamed of you, but that Jesus himself has given up on your soul. And if you're like Mark, and you do believe all of this, you really do - you have faith in Jesus and this stupid Promise system, and even still, even with those things, you still can't make yourself good enough, because what you're trying to change isn't changeable, it's like your height or the shape of your ears, whatever, then it's like this place does make things happen to you, or at least it's supposed to convince you that you're always gonna be a dirty sinner and that it's completely your fault because you're not trying hard enough to change yourself. It convinced Mark.

I also waited to feel like myself, as if it would land on me all at once, this feeling like I was me again because I was home. And it didn't come.

That's because we have it so good, I told her, trying on his deep voice. We impersonated him all the way home, laughing and blowing bubbles, both of us knowing that he was right. We did have it so good.

What is it that I'm doing again?"
"You know that already," she said. "You just think that you don't, but you do. It's what you came all this way for.

Maybe I still haven't become me. I don't know how you tell for sure when you finally have.

School was out for the day, it was just barely starting to feel like spring, and everybody streamed through the hallways drunk on 3:15-p.m. freedom, leaving the rush of students headed for the main doors only long enough to pause at their lockers before rejoining it, like all of it was choreographed, every moment rehearsed, every sound and sight a special effect
the slam and rattle of the metal locker doors, the "call me laters" and "fuckin' chemistry tests" loud and throaty, the thick smell of just-lit cigarettes as soon as you hit the outside steps, the sound of mix tapes blaring from cars as they tore away from the student parking lot, windows down on both sides. I usually liked to soak in all of that for a minute or two, just linger at my locker before heading off to change for practice. But that day there was Coley.

Just wait, dude," Jamie had said. "I'm serious. It's fucking hard-core." Since Jamie described everything from zombie movies to his parents' fights to the new enchilada platter at Taco John's as "fucking hard-core," none of us could gauge much by it.

You can't catch somebody doing something when they're not hiding.

You don't know anything about God. You don't even know anything about the movies.

When you run into yourself, you run into feelings you never thought you had.

But I couldn't ever make that dream happen. It just came on its own, the way dreams do.

I was doing my little stand up shtick, the one I did for pretty girls, so they'd like me quickly and wouldn't try too hard to actually get to know me beyond my role as wisecracking Cameron, the orphan. Maybe it was a little like flirting, but also a kind of protection: Don't get too close; I'm just jokes with substance.

But Ruth was wrong, too. There was more than just one other world beyond ours; there were hundreds and hundreds of them, and at 99 cents apiece I could rent them all.

When I closed my eyes and saw her drinking tea and opened them and still could see her, and I wanted so much to see more.

And there I was sending all the wrong signals to the right people in the wrong ways. Again, again, again.

Do you think we'd get in trouble if anyone found out?"
"Yeah," I said right away, because even thought no one had ever told me, specifically, not to kiss a girl before, nobody had to.
It was guys and girls who kissed - in our grade, on TV, in the movies, in the world; and that's how it worked: guys and girls.
Anything else was something weird.

I've got the weed, Jane said, and we all laughed the way you laugh when you're trying to be brave in the face of something that scares you.

Too much had happened that night, too much had happened before that night, and so too much climbed into bed with them, sat heavily upon them, and kept them up and thinking, even if they did not say the things they were thinking to each other.

I think it was probably the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
"I can't believe I don't have my camera," Jane said again, her voice almost reverent.
"You couldn't ever get this into a picture," I said. "And you'd miss it while you were trying to.

I felt all the ways in which this world seemed so, so enormous
the height of the trees, the hush and tick of the forest, the shift of the sunlight and shadows
but also so, so removed.

A relationship with a higher power is often best practiced alone.

As we walked, Jane whistled songs I didn't recognize. She was a good whistler and a fast walker, the squeak of her leg comforting, like the chug of a train or the whir of a fan, a piece of machinery doing its job. I liked following just behind her; she had such purpose to all of her moves.

The afternoon my parents died, I was out shoplifting with Irene Klauson.

I hate sour cream and onion Pringles," I told the dashboard where I had my feet planted until Ruth pushed them down.
"But you love Pringles," Ruth actually rattled the canister.
"I hate sour cream and onion anything. All lesbians do." I blew heaps of bubbles into my milk with the tiny straw that came cellophaned to the carton.
"I want you to stop using that word," Ruth jammed the lid back onto the can.
"Which word? Sour or cream?" I plastic laughed with my reflection in the passenger-side window.

Everything was heightened the way it always is when summer is slipping away to fall, and you're younger than eighteen, and all you can do is suck your cherry Icee and let the chlorine sting your nose, all the way up into the pockets behind your eyes, and snap your towel at the pretty girl with the sunburn, and hope to do it all again come June.

I just liked girls because I couldn't help not to.

In the embrace's release I caught the scent again. Unmistakable. Marijuana. These homos were high as kites.

If you don't know for sure, then what's the big thing about trying stuff out?" Jamie said, looking not at me but looking out at that statue, just like Hennitz.
I still didn't have any of the right words. "It's more like maybe I do know and I'm still confused too, at the same time. Does that make sense? I mean, it's like how you noticed this thing about me tonight, you saw it, or you already knew it - it's there. But that doesn't mean it's not confusing or whatever.

Now there was photographic evidence of me with a girl. Lindsey pack the camera in her duffel while I contemplated the film inside it, how it was pregnant with our secret, its birth inevitable.

It felt really good to do something that made no sense at all.

In that moment I was as jealous of her getting to leave Montana as I'd ever been of anything or anyone in my life.

There were angry clouds building up behind the moutains, black-gray clouds, great clumps of them colored just like cotton balls after Aunt Ruth cleaned off her eye makeup from a big night out, all gunky with mascara and eye shadow. (p 378)

I told myself that I didn't need any of that shit, but there it was, repeated to me day after day after day. And when you're surrounded by a bunch of mostly strangers experiencing the same thing, unable to call home, tethered to routine on ranchland miles away from anybody who might have known you before, might have been able to recognize the real you if you told them you couldn't remember who she was, it's not really like being real at all. It's plastic living. It's living in a diorama. It's living the life of one of those prehistoric insects encased in amber: suspended, frozen, dead but not, you don't know for sure.