Quotes from Barry Lyga

Even though the story takes place in the past, it feels very much like the present or the near future. It feels like something incipient, imminent, pervasive. Like a fog so cold it's a thousand needles in your skin, just barely breaking the surface.

I surrender. Sometimes I feel like that's all I do with her.

I have no reason not to believe any of the things I've been told. I'm told so many things. I was a child. It was an accident. It wasn't my fault. I'm told. I was four years old.

I like the rain. I like it ferocious and I like it gentle. I like sudden showers that last the afternoon and sprinkles that don't last the time it takes to run to the car. Rain is clean.

I'm sorry," I want to say, but don't. Every time my mother tells me she loves me, this is what I want to say.

The key word is "friend-zone" is friend.

The distractions then were card catalogs and dust and the smell of old paper and ink. The distractions were deep.

disguising yourself wasn't just about making yourself look different; it was about making yourself look different from what people were looking for.

That night, after dark, before the rain, I sneak out of the house. I've mastered this particular skill over the course of many dead nights, when the silence is too loud and the solitude too confining. [...] the truth is, I could simply leave.

They sent spies", Gramma went on, her voice a hush, "and they look like one man, but they can split into two, then four, and so on. I've seen it before. During the war. It's a Communist trick and they taught it to the Democrats so that they could take our guns. I would have fought them off, but they already made the shotgun disappear.

This is where. This is where it will happen. This is where I will do it. When the time comes. I've fired a gun once in my life. I'll do it again. When the time comes.

On such flimsy foundations are best friendships built.

Another year down. Ten years. No one said anything. No one ever says anything. Nothing online. Nothing in the Sunday edition of the "Lowe County times"--"the Loco"--that Mom still has delivered every week. Memory holes are efficient.

No one else needs to feel bad about what happened. Only one person.

No one else needs to feel bad about what happened. Only one person. I wish there were a way to assuage him, a way to tell him, "It's all right. You don't have to step around the rusty nails and broken glass of my past. Don't beat yourself up." But the only way to do that would be to acknowledge it in the first place, to say it happened, and I can't do that. When I try to talk about it, everything goes haywire.

The world is filled with invisible, theoretical assassins, armed projections of our deepest ids, bearing guns loaded with wish-bullets. If you listen closely, you can hear them singing as they whiz by your head, always passing harmlessly through their intended targets.

I'm no good at the new games because I rarely play them. I like old things. Old books. Old movies. Old TV shows. [...] Life was more complicated, but it was quieter, I bet. Slower. [...] The distractions then were card catalogs and dust and the smell of old paper and ink. The distractions were deep. I wonder what it would be like to go back in time, to live as long ago as the 1980s, or even further back. To know what was to come.

symbolism is bullshit. Because my sister's room is not preserved, but no one has moved on. We're all still stuck in place.

No matter what his birth certificate said or didn't say, he was Billy Dent's son.

I try to stay out of her way. This is just something I do. I avoid her. [...] I don't want her to see me too often, to encounter me, to deal with me. Me, this walking, talking, living, breathing, eating, shitting, farting reminder of what she's had and what she's lost. [...] I don't linger in the house. I sleep in late, stay out late, keep my bedroom door closed when I'm home. I make myself invisible, intangible. It's easier for her, it's easier for me, just easier, period.

Women in the presence of their children were the deadliest of the species.

if I say nothing, she gets angry, and I don't like to make her angry. Not because of anything she does or says when she's angry, but just because making her angry makes me sad. She doesn't deserve it.

I don't want to think about or start thinking about figuring out my life, for whatever it's worth.

I don't know." And I don't. But I don't care. I don't care about anything. I can't believe that I'm standing here, talking to her.