Rory Power Quotes

It all feels forgotten, like we're the first people here in a hundred years. No tire tracks left on the road, no sign this was ever anything but what it is now. We shouldn't be here. This place isn't ours anymore.

I've spent every day since I met her telling myself the wrong thing. Telling myself over and over that she was cold, when maybe she was burning the whole time.

I couldn't take my eyes off her the whole night, It was like she made sense, finally, in her father's house, with mismatched furniture and the back door thrown open.

I miss the north side cliff and the waves below, and I miss the way the wind steals your breath like it never belonged to you in the first place.

Usually, it was an accident. A lie I never set out to tell. A trick I never meant to play. I'd open my mouth, and something strange would come out, new and not mine. Like there was someone else inside.

For a second I can see it all laid out across her. The longing and the resignation and the betrayal, the sting of watching the island she loves steal the people she pretends she doesn't.

Some days it's fine. Others it nearly breaks me. The emptiness of the horizon, and the hunger in my body, and how will we ever survive this if we can't survive each other?

It's like that, with all of us here. Sick, strange, and we don't know why. Things bursting out of us, bits missing and pieces sloughing off, and then we harden and smooth over.

There's no room to feel bad. If I feel that, I have to feel everything else.

That yes, it's exactly what they think, and nothing like it, and a hundred other things at once. I will always wish I were hers, and I will always want to be only my own. I haven't found a way yet to make the two fit.

Reese is trying, but she can't get it quite right, because nobody's Byatt but Byatt, not even the girl in these memories. There's this place in her, somewhere nobody can touch, not me or Reese or anyone. It's just hers, and I don't even know what it is, really, just that it's there, and that she takes it with her when she goes.

I love her so much more when she's not here.

But Byatt's our girl." I'm watching Reese's face, and I have her. I know I do. "We are supposed to protect her. Just like she'd do it for us." I take a deep breath. "Just like I'd do it for you.

She's never liked us much, not since she complained that there were no boys on the island, and Reese gave her the blankest look I've ever seen and said, "Plenty of girls, though.

Reese says my name once, just once. Stern and strong, and she believes I can do this, so I have to.

Byatt's carved her initials over and over. BW. BW. BW. She does that everywhere. On the bunk, on her desk in every class we had, on the trees in the grove by the water. Marking Raxter as hers, and sometimes I think if she asked, I'd let her do the same to me.

I'm still bitter," I say. "Nobody ever gave me anything for my first." Byatt laughs, her hands moving quick to open the soup can, and she gives me the lid. "There. My gift to you.

A sparking. I know this feeling. Just before a flare-up, there's a moment. Hard to describe, hard to pin down, but for me it almost makes it worth it. The pain and the loss, all of it a fair price for this. This strength, this power, this eagerness to bare my teeth.

I thought something of my old life would still be here. I thought something of us would have survived.