Jardine Libaire Quotes

It's like he never wanted anything, but only thought and fretted about what he should want, what other people wanted him to want.

But Elise eclipses the woman from Jamey's future, the lady in tennis whites flashing her diamond as she drinks orange juice fresh-squeezed by a maid. A woman Jamey never quite believed in anyway.

It's amazing how a certain time in your life can seem to be a prelude, but when you look back, you realize it was a whole work, with a beginning, middle, and end.

A dinner party is the oldest experiment. Trap a bunch of souls in a room. Faces move like painted moons, rising and setting, as talk blows in from the east. The thunk and freckles of a hand slammed down on the table in laughter, the noise of a long night unscrolled like a map. Madeira and Roquefort. Paper towels for napkins. The maroon wall telephone rings: next round of folks on their way!

Night shift. Jamey raises his arm, and a hundred arms are raised. He smiles, with thousands of teeth. Jamey thinks of Narcissus bending to the pool. He thinks of how a swan on a calm lake is one with its reflection, and then lifting off, the bird divides from its self, and both parts becomes smaller and smaller. Division is more interesting than duplication, and an ax is a fascinating tool. It makes a fallen tree into wood that will keep your family warm. It does more than separate a whole into pieces; it changes the spirit of the thing, its use. He thinks about Elise checking her compact, and how he looks over her shoulder to catch her outlined eye in the mirror. Her eye, separated from the rest of her, floating. Normally he doesn't let his mind split into pieces, because it frightens him, but he's in a container here. He has so much time to think on the night shift.

You go through life thinking that there's a secret to life. And the secret to life is there is no secret to life.

The hollows around her eyes were darkly glamorous, her mouth sullen: she had the beauty of an insomniac.

Outside my window, truckers trucked, hookers fucked, cops cruised, kids smoked, elders yelled, invalids slept, spouses fought, lovers kissed, while I watched a pussycat playing with stars in a black room.

His classes... had committed mutiny. The simplest, most innocent concepts turned overnight into enemies, capable of triggering full system shutdown. Light is not light but energy. A person will never see his own face, just its reflection, or a photograph of it. Brain waves are more active during dreams than waking life. Roses don't smell beautiful; they smell like ripe fruit, which is good for survival, and so they're defined as beautiful in our aesthetic beliefs.

Progress can be unglamorous.

A returned love letter is written in the most violent language, by your own hand.

The stuff that changes your life is never very dramatic. You know? Not to other people.

I now doubted myself. Innocencce was finite and could not be regenerated. Like spinal fluid. I knew this because I had run out.

Many hours later, Elise and Jamey go home, after dancing and fire juggling and ice queens, and they never see Frankie again. He was reunited with his tribe. Everything that was odd and ungainly about him became beautiful in the right crowd.

She was handed more personality than other mortals, and chemically fertilized in a glasshouse - now her bionic strength allows her to teleport platters of watercress sandwiches from the kitchen to the library, where she's beating her friends at backgammon.

As filthy as any night was, a New York City morning is always clean. The eyes get washed.
Flowers in white deli buckets are replenished. The population bathes, in marble mausoleums of Upper East Side showers, or in Greenwich Village tubs, or in the sink of a Chinatown one-bedroom crammed with fifteen people. Some bar opens and the first song on the jukebox is Johnny Thunders, while bums pick up cigarette butts to see what's left to smoke. The smell of espresso and hot croissants. The weather vane squeaks in the sun. Pigeons are reborn out of the mouths of blue windows.

But in this life we take turns at being enchanting, then enchanted. First we play in the streets, unaware of the freedom burning in the sun on our hair and the cigarette in our mouth, unconscious of the daydreams we inspire. Then it's our time to sit at a window and watch, and we are moved.

But one day, the things that make you free start to keep you down.

Elise thinks of Denise's laugh cracking like thunder over the Turnbull houses, the paprika in her chili, the way her bra cuts into her back, the powdery heat of her body when they'd lie on the bed in the summertime, the afternoon too hot for anything but gossip and game shows. Her mother played with Elise's hair like it was her own, absentmindedly twirling it as they smoked.

She didn't tell me how to live, and I didn't tell her how to die. We let sleeping dogs lie.

She'd half loved men, and they'd half failed her.

Fucking, drinking, smoking, loving, living, freebasing, spending, laughing, crying, working, falling apart, kissing, writing, blacking out.

Taped to her wall, where someone else might hang a crucifix, is a page torn from Rolling Stone: Prince in a misty lavender paradise.

The dreaminess of the night shift is constant, and objects float - keys and coffee cups and Chinese containers and tissues. Time seems free to do what it wants.

Binkie, the one and only. He can hear her rings clacking on the plastic phone, and he chuckles, envisioning with amusement the bejeweled and suntanned manicured grip his grandmother thinks she has on his balls. And she does.

My heart perceived wildernesses of contradictions and impossible truths and mystical lies.

She likes the mystery of that changeover, those fifteen minutes of sundown when the streets and trees and people and parked cars are delicate and immediate, every sound and smell and movement amplified by the lowest light or the lightest darkness. Even a city that's broken and dirty can, in that time, be divine and intimate.

He remembers noticing his dad's shadow was shorter than the others, and he had a visceral sense his father was weaker than the rest, and that he was more dangerous as a weak person with a lot of power than a powerful person with a lot of power.