Ilsa J. Bick Quotes

How people react is going to be based on how you react.

That pain moves when you move; it mutters between every breath; it spikes your ears; it rips. You think pain can't be any more horrible than that.

Until you discover that the well is bottomless. There's always more.

You really didn't appreciate how thick, how powerful water was until you had to fight it.

I think. I sense. I wonder.

I gargled a laugh, but I'd never felt more like crying in my life. I'm fine.

Tell yourself you're dead, the way Matt does, so the past can't hurt you.

It was, come to think of it, a little like a kinder, gentler Psycho-Dad making one of his command decisions. Exactly the same, only without all the fuss and blood.

They call it the drowning instinct. It's when drowning doesn't look like drowning. (pg. 241)

I am a ghost in a land of phantoms and remembered nightmares.

I didn't throw the paper away.
Maybe I should have.
Oh, the things you know in retrospect.

Would it interest you, at all, to know that he did try to scramble back onto the ice? That his hands grabbed and his fingers clawed, but the ice - that treacherous, greedy, teasing ice - kept breaking and breaking and breaking, sketching a path straight for me? And that when he saw what would happen to me, he stopped trying to save himself?
Would you believe that someone could love anyone that much?

Thinking about all that was exhausting. Despite the hours I'd spent getting shrink-wrapped, I still wasn't sold that talking did a whole heck of a lot except let everyone else know what was going on inside your head. It's not like talking ever made anything go away.

I doubted I would need my eyes. I drew in the dark, after all.

She'd drawn the moment of her death.
No. NO. She'd DRAWN herself to death.

Follow your heart. Just don't get lost.

You want to brawl. You want to fight. Fighting tricks you into believing you can change the past, even when the past is dead and gone and all of it ashes.

Staying alive just to stay alive isn't enough.

What's the point of not taking chances? I don't know if I could stand living my whole life afraid.

We all have our fictions, little lies we tell ourselves to keep going from one day to the next.

So I think I'll stay here a little while longer. There's plenty of time to get off this gurney and open that door and rejoin the rest of you.
There's all the time I have left on Earth.
There's the rest of my life.

She's got the kind of ethereal, unselfconscious beauty some young girls possess that breaks your heart. Or theirs.

I am a ghost in a land of phantoms and forgotten nightmares.

No one can help but stare at the monster, because horror is a cousin to awe.

Don't get so caught up in looking behind you forget to look ahead.

Because if you can just hold off the moment when you must confront reality, time stands still and you can keep pretending that life will continue as you´ve known it: that nothing-not even something as wonderful and as terrible as love-has broken your world beyond repair.

Honestly, Bob: how do you carve a scream?

The grief in her green eyes slips then hardens and, for an instant, Pendleton sees the woman she has become and has no right being, not at sixteen.

Monster or not, he was risking his neck to save her.

Desire is so much sweeter when you cant have it.

For that matter, my heart is broken. So maybe they´ĺl give me his. It´s something to shoot for.
And maybe, in all that, Bob?
There is forgiveness...

It was that stages-of-anger thing. I was shocked and then I got pissed and then I fought like hell ... and then I went numb. They called it acceptance, but it wasn't. It's what happens when you have only two choices: live with the monster, or kill yourself.

My English teacher said that a writer is the worst judge of his own work.

Dewerman was this bearded 1960's throwback: a Teletubby in tie-dye, suspenders, and thinning hair scraped back into a stringy gray rat.

Not everyone wears their scars on their skin.

That´s the problem with the truth.
Sometimes the truth is ambiguous, or really bad cliche.

Neither was evil. They were both true to who they are.

But sticking to rules just because they're there does not make them right. You need to learn when the rules should be broken.

As a doc, though, I've seen what happens when people are under a lot of stress. Doesn't always bring out their best. When people are scared, they get angry. They'll do things they never thought they would. They'll bargain and compromise in order to survive; they'll chase after miracle cures and believe just about anything so long as it gives them hope. When hope fails, then watch out. Some people get brutal. They'll turn on each other; they'll become their own worst enemies.

What about study hall? Shouldn't I go to the library?
"What for, Ms. Lord?" Mr. anderson said. "You're with me

Obeying orders just to obey is the mark of a person who has ceased to think. Remember, it is better to suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong.

Something my shrink once said bubbled up from memory: believing that everything is your fault is like saying the world revolves around you and that is pure narcissism and no less destructive.

This Army of Light was mine. I had summoned it. I had DRAWN it.
Could I have stopped it? I don't know.
The truth is, I didn't want to.

There are those individuals who die for a cause, and we say they have made the ultimate sacrifice. We call them martyrs, and we never doubt their sincerity.
Yet many others search their entire lives for something - or someone - worth dying for and this is very different. These are the lonely and the desperate, fearful that their lives have no meaning. They yearn for the bullet, if only someone else will pull the trigger.

Raccoon." She saw Ellie put a hand to her mouth to cover the giggles and then looked back at Tom. "Like, you caught it?"
"Well, it sure didn't get Fed-Exed [ ... ]

When the heart sinks, people fall.

The familiar was usually invisible; how many people really noticed everything they saw?

Those brain-zapped kids weren't the only - or maybe even the worst - enemy.

I´d never heard a man cry before, Bob, but...it´s awful. (...) I think some man aren´t used to it and don´t know what to do with all that feeling. Their emotions are hexane ignited in their chests and rips them apart, and then they feel like they´re going to die-just as something was dying, at that moment in Mitch.

We were like matching bookends, almost touching but with volumes between us and stories, so many stories.