Zoe Whittall Quotes

When I tell her I feel like the other woman, she laughs, that's just learned sexist bullshit. We are all in charge of our own bodies and what we decide to do with them. We are all our own.
I believed it when she said it, like she'd opened up a new valve that had been stuck. I felt unconfined and open-minded and totally confused. Intellectually, non-monogamy made complete sense; emotionally, it felt like sandpaper across my eyelids.

Sometimes being an adult doesn't prevent you from making terrible choices

I am having a quarter-life crisis," I announced to my mother.
"My generation never had those, we just had babies and thought about killing them from time to time.

It felt like the times were good, like we were remembering a time before Rachel died, even though things were never this good then, because they were just normal, and ordinary is never the kind if good you remember.

Della & I are drunk at the top of Mont-Royal. We have an open blue plastic thermos of red wine at our feet. It's the first day of spring & it's midnight & we've been peeling off layers of winter all day. We stand facing each other, as if to exchange vows, chests heaving from racing up & down the mountain to the sky. My face is hurting from smiling so much, aching at the edges of my words. She reaches out to hold my face in her hands, dirty palms form a bowl to rest my chin. I'm standing on a tree stump so we're eye to eye. It's hard to stay steady. I worry I may start to drool or laugh, I feel so unhinged from my body. It's been one of those days I don't want to end. Our goal was to shirk all responsibility merely to enjoy the lack of everyday obligations, to create fullness & purpose out of each other. Our knees are the colour of the ground-in grass. Our boots are caked in mud caskets. Under our nails is a mixture of minerals & organic matter, knuckles scraped by tree bark. We are the thaw embodied.

She says, You have changed me, Eve, you are the single most important person in my life. If you were to leave me, I would die.

At that moment, our breath circling from my lungs & into hers, I am changed. Perhaps before this I could describe our relationship as an experiment, a happy accident, but this was irrefutable. I was completely consumed & consuming. It was as though we created some sort of object between us that we coul

Lauren Kirshner creates a first-person narrator you never stop rooting for ... [Where We Have to Go] highlights Kirshner as a new novelist to watch. A very strong, original debut.