Quotes from Vendela Vida

There is this sense of time when you're traveling, that the time is not how you know it, but how a country knows it.

Recently, everything around me felt familiar yet amiss, like the first time you ride in the back seat of your own car.

People pretend things didn't happen. Or so what, they happened, it's okay. Well, it's never okay. It's always ruined.

When it comes to books...They're like lifelong friends to me; I need to know they're there, even if I don't check in with them on a regular basis.

and on some nights in bed, in that moment before sleep erased the day, I would picture the way the sky in Lapland looked the morning I left, how the train had sped south beneath a sky that was brighter than it had been in weeks. It had pulsed with reds and oranges, as though hiding a beating heart.

Even the air between them seemed to be dented, waiting to be straightened again.

That was the same week my physics teacher taught my class the concept of infinity. I cried about it every night for months.

Lazlo's mom, Ágota, and my dad had a falling out over the kinds of things siblings usually have falling outs over: money and love. My father made money and Aunt Ágota lost money. Then there was disagreement about how their mother, my grandmother, should live. My father thought a retirement home. Ágota wanted to be paid to take care f her. The argument didn't help anyone. In the end, my grandmother died anyway.

We are thirteen, almost fourteen, and these streets of Sea Cliff are ours.

Sometimes we watch Bill Murray movies with him and his friends at his house on Sea View Terrace and marvel at the way the boys can recite all the lines the way we know every word of The Outsiders.

This is the way of air travel: fellow passengers applaud because they didn't die, and then they cut in front of you so they can exit four seconds earlier.

We are thirteen, almost fourteen, and these streets of Sea Cliff are ours. We walk these streets to our school perched high over the Pacific and we run these streets to the beaches, which are cold, windswept, full of fishermen and freaks. We know these wide streets and how they slope, how they curve toward the short, and we know their houses.

I run to the water's edge and the cold ocean licks my toes. Without touching my face I can feel that it's wet with fog and tears and sweat. I stand there, on the cusp of the ocean and listen to its loud inhale. And then it recedes and takes everything from my childhood with it the porcelain dolls, the tap-dancing shoes, the concert ticket stubs, the tiny trophies, and the long, long swing.

hands you his business card and requests that you tell your

At the Konya bus station

Sometimes we catch them in jars for a minute before releasing them. Sometimes we wait too long to release them and find them dead. We know the names of the girls who keep the butterflies too long, and we have no idea what to do with this information.

the four of us become like paper dolls-we are always together, connected.

We love you," my dad says, and mother nods. My mother my shows her love in every way possible but has a hard time saying the word. My dad and I have had many conversations about why this might be; we think it's because she's lost so many people she's said the word "love" to. Half her family is dead.

People tell me I look skinny when they want something from me. What does she want from me?

How do you feel?" Ewa asks. "Betrayed." "By who?" she says. "Whom," I say. "Who?" "I feel betrayed by my femininity.

I hope my girls don't grow up to be models," Maria Fabiola says. But there is something in her voice that implies that this will be difficult to fight-their beauty will pull them inexorably toward modelhood.

She says that you were all molded into being replicas of one another. She says the only way out was to be extraordinary.

I feel a loosened Band-Aid release itself from my ankle and fall off, but I don't turn around to pick it up. I don't care about litter because I am immortal.

Despair was a thing of the past, discarded like a scarf through the window of a moving car.