Quotes from Elizabeth Brundage

That was of no consequence now, but you don't easily forget the people you grew up with, and she made a point of listening carefully to him

Maybe killing comes naturally to people, an instinct nobody likes to admit, a survival reflex inherited from our Neanderthal cousins. So maybe it's the other stuff, the good manners that supposedly make us human, that are the real aberrations.

The trick to hiding something, she'd told him once, is to put it right out in plain sight.

wilderness—wild and brutal and glorious—

Beauty depends on the unseen, the visible upon the invisible

Something kept them together, frustration possibly. Like they were two parts of a troubling equation that neither could find the answer to. It was out there somewhere, in infinity, she often thought. Maybe they'd never find it.

She said most people were good on the inside, where it mattered. You have to give them a chance to show their goodness, she used to say. Some people need more time, that's all.

Awkward interests me, he said. At least when you are feeling awkward you are always thinking. When you are feeling fabulous, for example, rare occurrence that it may be, you stop thinking altogether. Which gets you into all kinds of trouble. Hence, you are for the better off feeling awkward. Just the sound of it on your tongue. Like chewing on screws.

Let me tell you about love. Love is a kind of madness and you would follow it anywhere, you don't care.

Attraction is composed of desire and danger.

Wooed by a vivid cover, she picked one up and leafed through it. She loved thee way it smelled, the ink, the fine paper, the oversized photographs.

Just the word beautiful was seductive - but what did it really mean? Beauty was a soft word that ached with possibility, pliant as dough. You could not presume to define it, she realized, because the very idea of beauty and all it represented was a subjective thing - in the eye of the beholder - but that wasn't really true anymore.

Things didn't really go away. You just learned to push them deeper.

But you couldn't really start over. That was a huge, modern lie invented by talk-show hosts. Sure you could change things that improved your life, but all the bad stuff lingered. It lingered in your body compromising your organs.

He wanted to dig a hole and put the past inside it and cover it back up again. He didn't know if flowers would grow there or not. He hoped they would.

She cried and he held her and he cried too. He didn't think that either could say what they were crying about, but it was something they needed to do, right now, together, and then, quite suddenly, they were laughing, hard, brash laughter that came up from someplace deep.

His life in general had been a neatly wrapped package of lies.

Too many choices, that's the problem. Sometimes you get to a point, you know?" She looked at his face. His eyes seemed distant. "What do you mean?" He shook his head. "You wake up one day and nothing's the same. It's like you're in the wrong life or something. I don't know how to explain it.

It was the simplest thing to do, loving someone, only it was the hardest thing, too, because it hurt.

There was the dream of happiness and then there was what was real.

There was no disguise for real love, she thought, and suddenly understood all that she did not have.

As corny as it sounds, Gallagher said, life is very long. You're supposed to mess up when you're young and other people sometimes benefit from your mistakes-as you did in this case. But things rarely stay the same. People grow up and change. They move on.

In situations of crisis, it was always best to rely on routine.

Adults make mistakes too.