Kat Rosenfield Quotes

I have learned that knowing where you're going means remembering where you've been. I'm not afraid of what lurks behind me, or ahead.

She stared at him. His eyes were glazed, glassy, blazing with triumph behind his glasses, and as his lip curled in a sneer, she felt it happen.
Her love for him - whatever shred of it was left - was gone. It had slunk away into the night. It would die out there, and she would not be sorry to leave it, at the side of the road, in a no-name town surrounded by nothing but blackness.
Quietly, she said, "Knew what, exactly?"
He licked his lips.
"I knew you'd never turn into such a whore without a little help."
"Good-bye."
The word was out, and she was gone.

It was there that I wanted, out there somewhere, when I sat elbow-to-elbow with my giggling friends and let my thoughts swirl up and away from the three-mile radius of our small town lives. In my head, I careened out of town and across state lines, until the landscape became strange and unfamiliar. I wanted to see all of it. Everything. The vast expanses of the flat Midwest, miles of horizontal earth with the curving horizon at its end. Strange, stunted trees and driftwood skeletons on the lonely windswept beaches of the farthest coasts. Towering oaks hung thick with the gray lace of Spanish moss, looming like hovering parents over shaded southern dirt. The California sun, dipping and disappearing into the ocean, tipping the waves with orange light.

I'd seen it happen, how hard it was to get out. Every year, one or two kids would visit from college for a long October weekend and simply never leave. They came home, cocooned themselves in the familiar radius of the town limits, and never broke free again. Years later, you'd see them working in the kitchen at the pizza place, or sitting at the bar in the East Bank Tavern. Shoulders hunched, jaw set, skin slack. And in the waning light of their eyes, the barest sensation that once upon a time, they been somewhere else ... or maybe it was only a dream.

Just because it's not hard science, just because it doesn't lead to a high-paying job at a hedge fund after college, doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing.

I shook my head. "it's not about living in a city."
It wasn't. Back then, it wasn't just getting away. It was about not coming back. It wasn't just the size and sensibility of this place that made in unbearable, but its pull - the weird magnetism that could sap your ambition, clip your wings, leave you inert and fascinated and sinking ever deeper into the choking quicksand of small-town life.

In a small town, unexplained tragedy can only go so long before it grows teeth, sprouts sharp claws, and turns, snarling, on its own self. Before fragments of gossip become rumors, and the rumors become suspicions. Before neighbors start eyeing each other with the mistrustful narrowness of oft-kicked dogs. Inside the safe shelter of their homes, husbands and wives draw the blinds tight and turn to each other, worrying at small bits of information and wondering who, who among their shrinking circle of trusted friends, might still know something he isn't telling.

She was dry, dry inside like a ten-thousand-year-old tomb, with the last of her life barely dampening the dirt underneath.

Our knowledge has no memory. We have always lived here; what we know has always been.