Julie Buntin Quotes

I want to go home, I want to go home, but what I mean, what I'm grasping for, is not a place, it's a feeling.

Above us, the sky, a shattered mirror of the lake, and of course, the stars - as distant and unknowable as every single person I'd ever met, even myself.

I think it's pretty common for teenagers to fantasize about dying young. We knew that time would force us into sacrifices - we wanted to flame out before making the choices that would determine who we became. When you were an adult, all the promise of your life was foreclosed upon, every day just a series of compromises mitigated by little pleasures that distracted you from your former wildness, from your truth.

Why do I keep doing this? Making her out to be more than what she was, grander, omniscient even, lovely and unreal. She could be such a bitch. She could sense what you hated about yourself, and is you pissed her off she'd throw it back in your face, she'd make sure you knew she thought it, too. Sometimes I feel like she is my invention. Like the more I say, the further from the truth of her I get. I'm trying to hold palmfuls of sand, but I squeeze harder, tighten my fists, and the quicker it all escapes.

Tell me what you can't forget, and I'll tell you who you are. I switch off my apartment light and she comes with the dark.

Everyone has a secret life. But when you're a girl with a best friend, you think your secret life is something you can share.

I was terrified. No matter how far I fell, something pulled me back to safety - school and its occasional fascinating gift, dopey, well-meaning men, and books, books, that's where I found her most often, in the intimacies of characters, Ruth and Sylvie in a towboat, Esperanza on Mango Street, Anna K., of course, right before she jumps.

Whenever I hear the word danger, I see Marlena and me staring into the mouth of that U-Haul in the winter hour between twilight and dark. Two girls full of plans, fifteen and seventeen years old in the middle of nowhere. Stop, I want to tell us. Stay right where you are, together. Don't move. But we will. We always do. The clock's already running.

Great loneliness, profound isolation, a cataclysmic, overpowering sense of being misunderstood. When does that kind of deep feeling just stop? Where does it go? At fifteen, the world ended over and over and over again. To be so young is kind of a self-violence. No foresight, an inflated sense of wisdom, and yet you're still responsible for your mistakes. It's a little frightening to remember just how much, and how precisely, I felt. Now, if the world really did end, I think I'd just feel numb.

Michigan was all lake and sky and stars, and I though back to Marlena asking me that question about dying and still agreed with the answer I'd given. There would be beauty to drowning here, to living your whole life in this place, to never knowing the uglier world outside.

For a teenage girl, a beautiful mother is a uniquely painful curse.

The effect Mom had on men infuriated me as a teenager, especially then, before I'd ever had sex. I resented her for failing in that way, too, by not giving me that quality, her charm, her way of making even prescription goggles look sort of geekily elegant. This is your daughter? people always said when she introduced me, like I'd stolen her, forced her to claim me as her own. This? I left them there.

Nostos algos. I want to go home. A phrase that's stuck on a loop, that I hear before falling asleep, waiting in line for my coffee, tapping the elevator button and rising through the sky to my apartment...and yet my desire is not attached to a particular place...I want to go home but what I mean, what I'm grasping for, is not a place. It's a feeling. I want to go back. But back where? Maybe to the first time I heard Stevie Nicks, to watching the snow fall outside the window with a paperback folded open in my lap, to the moment before I tasted alcohol, to virginity and not really knowing that things die, back to believing that something great is still up ahead, back to before I made the choices that would hem me in to the life I live now. A life that I regret sometimes, I think, only because it's mine, because it's turned out this way and not some other way, because I can't go back and change what will happen.

One of us fell easily asleep, a million days left except that particular one, forever almost over, an ending that happens again and again no matter how much I don't want it to. Maybe that's all loss is. What happens, whether you like it or not. What won't let you go.
Marlena - Look. I didn't forget.
I wrote it down.

When you grow up, who you were as a teenage either takes on a mythical importance or it's completely laughable. I wanted to be the kind of person who wiped those years away; instead, I feared, they defined me.

Sometimes I wonder how I'd tell this if I didn't have so many books rattling around inside me. The truth is both a vast wilderness and the tiniest space you can imagine.

With Mom's story, my perception of my parents underwent a series of rapid changes, the way letters on an eye exam do when the doctor flips the lenses - clear, then blurred, sharp, then back to incomprehensible fuzz.

I've never believed in the idea of an innocent bystander. The act of watching changes what happens. Just because you don't touch anything doesn't mean you are exempt. You might be tempted to forgive me for being just fifteen, in over my head, for not knowing what to do, for not understanding, yet, the way even the tiniest choices domino, until you're irretrievably grown up, the person you were always going to be. Or in Marlena's case, the person you'll never have a chance to be. The world doesn't care that you're just a girl.

Let the record show that I was smarter than I looked. And anyway, I touched.

I noticed, and begin to see the outline of the best friend, the girl she shaped herself around, according to. For so many women, the process of becoming requires two. It's not hard to make out the marks the other one left.

What a nice thing to say," Mom said, standing up a little straighter, as if she'd been watered. Marlena's manners were unpracticed, but she was what Dad would call winning. She was abrupt in a way that I always associate with rude people, but bestowed a kind of brightness on whatever caught her interest---if it happened to be you, nothing felt more sublime. Though when the beam of her attention drifted away, a searchlight scanning the next bit of horizon, it stung. She would have done well in New York, where so many people cultivate that air of intensity cut with indifference.