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1 " I love Gina. But I carry you in my bloodstream. This isn't a choice.""Of course it's a choice.""No, it's what I have to do. "
― Miranda Cowley Heller , The Paper Palace
2 " Does letting go mean losing everything you have, or does it mean gaining everything you never had? "
3 " But it’s what we do, what we’ve done for years now. We drag our past behind us like a weight, still shackled, but far enough back that we never have to see, never have to openly acknowledge who we once were. "
4 " Nice is the enemy of interesting. "
5 " There are some swims you do regret, Eleanor. The problem is, you never know until you take them. "
6 " Every single time I see the ocean, even if I’ve been there in the morning, it feels like a new miracle—its power, its blueness always just as overwhelming. Like falling in love. "
7 " There is no such thing as unforgiveable between people who love each other. But even as I'm thinking it, I know it's not really true. "
8 " If I could fly backward, I would," I said. To the safety of branches, to the time when my heart raced for him like a hummingbird's, 1,200 beats per second. And he said, as he always did, "I know. "
9 " Flip a coin, Eleanor. If the answer you get disappoints you, do the opposite."We already know the right answer, even when we think we don´t. "
10 " I wonder if he would love me if he could see inside my head, the pettiness, the dirty linen of my thoughts, the terrible things that I have done. "
11 " Ever since I was old enough to question my own instincts, my mother has given me the same piece of advice: “Flip a coin, Eleanor. If the answer you get disappoints you, do the opposite.” We already know the right answer, even when we don’t—or we think we don’t. But what if it’s a trick coin? What if both sides are the same? If both are right, then both are wrong. "
12 " Knowledge can be power, but it can also be poison. "
13 " But this time when I pull away from him, it is agonizing. Not found, but lost. I pause, stand on the precipice of memory, wanting so desperately to fall into it, knowing I can't. Jonas is animal, Peter is mineral. And I need a rock. "
14 " The waiting begins early, I think. The lies begin early. But so do dreams and hopes and stories. "
15 " At the crest of the hill two stallions backs black against a nectar wash graze on the green-tang clover, acorns to sniff out. We lie together beneath the flowering hawthorn, your white collar unbuttoned. Once, I heard the sound of wind under water, breathed in the sea and survived. "
16 " He takes my hair in his fists, kisses me. Rough, hard, unhinged. I don't want to give in, but I kiss him back with a love that feels like drowning. The breathless desire to breathe. "
17 " It hasn't even been twenty-four hours and already, when I'm not with him, I'm marking time until I am--as if my own life has ceased to exist and is only the time in between him and him. It angers me, this endless jangling. I picture my stomach cavity filled to the brim with little pieces of bitten fingernails. A lifetime's worth of pain that never got digested. When they cut me open, that's what they will find. Strange deposits, sharp and brittle. "
18 " I could look at him and nothing else for eternity and be happy. I could listen to him, my eyes closed, feel his breath and his words wash over me, time and time and time again. It is all I want. "
19 " Andrea waves the smoke away from her face every time Martha exhales, but Martha ignores her and, if anything, seems to exhale more directly into Andrea’s face each time. I have always enjoyed Martha. "
20 " Elle . . .” Jonas calls out as I head down the steps into the subway. I stop, but this time I don’t turn around. “Peter isn’t the ring guy,” he says. “I’m the ring guy. "
