Quotes from Quan Barry

Remember that darkness simply requires another way of seeing. Be your own light. And just like that, you'll find yourself everywhere instantly.

To be anything but kind in the face of male desire was dangerous. Nobody had to teach us this lesson—it was just something we knew from the earliest days on the playground.

We danced all night. We danced the length of one song. We danced for just a moment. May we be so lucky as to still be dancing under the light of the Harvest Moon three hundred years on!

Maybe that was their magic. Having fun and enjoying one another's company. Being lifted up even when you were being beaten down.

What would you yourself do to remain forever young? What would you confess to the great and silent god that watches in the dark?

Third Year German was the only class where she felt vaguely human. They spent the period listening to "99 Luftballons" and trying to work out the lyrics back into English. Hielten sich fur Captain Kirk. When you found German comforting, you knew you were in trouble

Sooner or later, her daughter would find out for herself what it meant to live in a world that pulled the plug on the Van Peebleses.

A sea of adolescence streamed by, each of us in our own way trying to both fit in and stand out.

Let X be the moon like a notary. Let Y be all things left unsaid.

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more. —JOHN UPDIKE, The Witches of Eastwick

And what happens if we don't remember? What happens if we never knew? Too many of us are here in the dark because in the rush and clamor of blood the third reptilian brain takes over, the one that says I do not recognize anything of myself in you, and so you are less than nothing.

The distance between heaven and earth is no greater than one's intention.

It's like looking through a time machine at ourselves thirty years ago. While the hair is smaller, the hunger is still outsized. Hunger is what gets anything done. Stay hungry, ladies, we think.

We should have loved her back, openly and without apology, but between the teen heart and the teen brain, only so much gets done.

To be anything but kind in the face of male desire was dangerous.

all of us naked as the day we were born, each of us a candle in the darkness, because while the moon is our soul sister, unlike her we are no one's reflection—we shine in dark places by the light of our own being.

Fact: like a telephone booth or a pair of size 6 Sasson jeans, the teen brain can hold only so much. This is doubly true when said information does not pertain to it. That's why teenagers are the original narcissists. It's not even in one ear, out the other. Truth is, 95% of stuff never wriggles in in the first place.

Life is a wheel. The way we end up where we begin. From here everything rises—the worn path, the moon with its long bright ears. Imagine water traveling back up into the sky, the sound of it climbing like a question. Who would we be if we had stayed?

There are so many things to say in the language of our kind, but really, nothing more needs to be said.

From the Latin for "terrible," "cruel." Atrox, atrocis. When did the word come to take on such scale? Endless pits gouged in the earth. The Americans in the hamlet of My Lai, some of them shooting themselves in the feet to get out of it. The South Vietnamese with their tiger cages, their filing a man's teeth down to the gums.

We are no one's reflection— we shine in dark places by the light of our own being

All I wanted was this place of glory and things that can never be to be.

Darkness simply requires another way of seeing. Be your own light.

Every three hundred years or so, our kind gets loosed upon an unsuspecting world. And this time around, the history books would know us as the 1989 Danvers High School Women's Varsity Field Hockey team. Be. Aggressive. B-E aggressive.