Katie Crouch Quotes

My first thought, as I followed Sean to that field behind the post office, was that he wanted a touch of this or that. And he did, really. But he also fancied himself a poetry lover. He would arrange us comfortably, then pull out a book and start to read. I would sit there on the plastic tarp, smoothing the plaid skirt of my uniform over my wool stockings, rather at a loss. How is a girl supposed to react to Keats? Does she gaze at the reader adoringly? Lie back seductively on one arm?

If you weren't the prettiest, it paid to be the smartest, because you could train your mind to understand these things.

He doesn't bother to talk, and I don't either, but we look. We stare. And for a moment, I am sure of everything. For a second, with my bare feet on the fresh thick grass, there has not been, for any of us, even one mistake.

We were all alive, and we loved and hated and lived brilliant, messy existences. The air is thick with our wanting.

Being unfaithful to yourself is not as hard as you'd think. I will never compromise myself for someone else, I always thought. I'll kill myself first. But it's so easy. It's like wearing earplugs. It's as if you've put your head under the pillow during a thunderstorm, so that all you can hear is the faint sound of muffled rain.

I wish I were the graceful sort. I was trained to be. "Never chase men or buses," my mother told me. "Another one will always come along." Still, I always run after the subway, and when men go, I follow.

Intelligence, one hoped, could override jealousy.

Don't you see?" she says. "I want your life to be better than mine. That's all any parent wants.

You're going to have to go beyond yourself to keep him. That's a tiring thing.

And then there's the truth beyond that, sitting like an old rock under green creek water: none of these things matter. Right now, in this moment, we have love. We have it in the sound of my daughter's laugher, in Mom's and Georgia's locked fingers, in the warm pressure of J.T.'s hand. It will leave, and it will come again, and when it does I'll give up everything and take it. Just like an addict. Like dry grass in new rain. It's not something I'm proud of necessarily. Then again, maybe I am.

It's important to love someone."
"Even if you can't have that person?"
"I think caring for someone is never a bad thing, even if the situation you idealize doesn't happen for you ... I think that anything that gets people through the day is a good thing."
"Like God?"
"Like God.

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I suppose there's a time in life when a garden of roses and lavender fails to blind a girl to the true shabbiness of a place. I myself had not reached that moment of clarity.

So yes, I knew how to dance. I just wasn't able to look at the person I was dancing with. A sort of glass cage fell over me, in the form of a distant, distracted smile.

These, of course, are not the preppy boys we go to school with; these are the dirt-in-the-cracks-of-the-hands kind of boys, farmhands and fishermen who, once school starts, we'll let drift away ... But they're nice to us because they're country, and they're just glad to have any kind of girl along. They keep coolers for us full of beers and sodas and green boiled peanuts in Ziplock bags and tell us we're pretty as models. They're either blind or lying, but you know what? It's summer, and we don't care.