Quotes from Polly Horvath

People can be hurt so badly that they choose to just stop in their tracks.

I left parts of myself some places and found others unexpectedly. New people appeared on the scene and others disappeared before I had a chance to say goodbye. All kinds of ordinary people gave their whole hearts to things you wouldn't think you could give your heart to.

Don't worry the trolls don't come to you. It's your own darkness that leads you to the trolls.

I think that it is death alone that makes things poignant.

The only really interesting things about someone that makes you want to explore them further is their heart.

Some people, well, most people just seem to show up on your life with no clear purpose. Have you noticed that? They're like dust mites. You know they're there, you just don't know what to do about them.

I am not in the body of life. I hover on the extremities. I float.

The only really interesting thing about someone that makes you want to explore them further is their heart, and Miss Honeycut has a teeny tiny pea-sized one and it takes you nowhere you want to go.

My mother smoked too but I guessed by now she had quit the habit, which was, I supposed, one of the advantages of being shipwrecked.

T)he only really interesting thing about someone that makes you want to explore them further is their heart

I keep staring at the bag in Mrs. Parks's hand: yellows, greens, blues, whites, pastel colors so soft they look as if they have faded in the sea. The washed colors of the sea and sleep. Pajama colors. The colors of baby clothes. In my nose is the smell of my brothers' heads after they are born. Maybe this is why people making journeys buy saltwater taffy. It gives you the lovely dreamy sense that you can start all over again from the beginning.

It's not the natural disasters you have to fear. It's the ones that are inside of you, waiting to happen.

It is never a bad thing to take up your fair share of space, said Mr. Bunny ambiguously.

Being together, like being able to see certain stars only with your peripheral vision, isn't something you can create. It's just something that happens to you.

I think part of her feared that if Mother could leave her that way, she must be unlovable. And of course, she wasn't.

And then she poked him again. Not because he wasn't paying attention but because when she did it the first time she found she liked it. Mrs. Bunny might think she was getting away with this, but Mr. Bunny was silently counting the pokes to pay her back later.

She was alone in the stillness of the universe a little while before all the confusion began. It was if she could hear it ticking, check in on the life at the very center of it, its wellspring that everyone somehow knows, before it was covered by noise.

Like in those Bunny Austen books you read where rabbits live in great parks with manor hutches?

You can be sunk low or as a skunk and still have a joy in your heart. Joy lives like one of those spinning things---a gyroscope in your heart. It doesn't seem to have any connection to circumstance, good or bad.

I would never go home again in quite the same way, but that was okay too.

How could a truck hack off my baby and leave the rest of my toes intact?

How could a truck hack off my baby toe and leave the rest of my toes intact?

It disguises itself as motor vehicle knowledge, but really it's physics, which any other time would be fascinating but not right now, not while you're trying to learn to drive.