Maile Meloy Quotes

Diabetes is passed that way
over and down, like a knight in chess.

I settled in with The Uninvited Guests thinking I knew what kind of Edwardian pleasures were in store: the fraught dinner party in an endangered, rambling house, the feuding family, the rich suitor, the disruptive visitors. The novel has all of those delightful things, but it also defied every one of my expectations. I saw none of it coming. I read it in one breathless sitting, and finished wanting to give it to everyone I know.

Now, alone on the roof, Valentine looked at her shoes and wished people would either stay or go away, but not constantly coming back and leaving again.

Children were experiments, and his had failed.

I baptize you in the name of the conservation of energy. What comes around goes around.

We have to think of a question that we wouldn't otherwise want to answer.'
He stood over the pot, looking down at the leaves. 'Something like, Who do you fancy?'
'That might work,' I said, even though it was the last question I wanted to answer. But it was impossible, suddenly, to tell a lie.
Benjamin took a deep sniff over the steam and turned to me. 'All right,' he said. 'So who do you fancy?'
I hesitated. 'Fancy means like, right?' I said stalling.
'Of course.'
I gritted my teeth against the answer coming out. but I couldn't stop myself. 'You,' I said helplessly.

There's a look little girls have who are adored by their fathers," Bea said. "It's that facial expression of being totally impervious to the badness of the world. If they can keep that look into their twenties, they're pretty much okay, they've got a force field around them. I don't know if Jonna ever had it. I think she's always known about the bad things.

He was acting like the man he wanted to be, in hopes that he could become him. He would keep acting until he couldn't stand it anymore, and then he would be the man he was.

To be a kid is to be invisible and to listen, and to interpret things that aren't necessarily meant for you to hear
because how else do you find out about the world?

Maybe we made her feel safe,' Aaron said. 'So she can be brave.

He held his hands tightly together and cursed his daughter for bringing the terrible world, with its humiliation and longing, back to his door.

The force with which he wanted it both ways made him grit his teeth. What kind of fool wanted it only one way?

When they started to drain a swamp where birds and fish had lived, for a new housing development down the road from his apartment, Steven watched the protests and the preparations with interest. The bird people were furious, the developers unmovable, and Steven was filled with relief that the fight wasn't his. Nothing here was his ... He thought there should have been something sad about how little he was tied up with the place, but instead it felt like freedom. He was free because it wasn't his water here, and they weren't his fish.

All the while, Everett felt both the threat of disorder and the steady, thrumming promise of having everything he wanted, all at once.

She craved a family, not having had enough of one to understand what a pain in the ass it was.