Quotes from Jardine Libaire

You go through life thinking that there's a secret to life. And the secret to life is there is no secret to life.

Binkie, the one and only. He can hear her rings clacking on the plastic phone, and he chuckles, envisioning with amusement the bejeweled and suntanned manicured grip his grandmother thinks she has on his balls. And she does.

She was handed more personality than other mortals, and chemically fertilized in a glasshouse - now her bionic strength allows her to teleport platters of watercress sandwiches from the kitchen to the library, where she's beating her friends at backgammon.

Elise thinks of Denise's laugh cracking like thunder over the Turnbull houses, the paprika in her chili, the way her bra cuts into her back, the powdery heat of her body when they'd lie on the bed in the summertime, the afternoon too hot for anything but gossip and game shows. Her mother played with Elise's hair like it was her own, absentmindedly twirling it as they smoked.

The hollows around her eyes were darkly glamorous, her mouth sullen: she had the beauty of an insomniac.

A returned love letter is written in the most violent language, by your own hand.

Taped to her wall, where someone else might hang a crucifix, is a page torn from Rolling Stone: Prince in a misty lavender paradise.

His classes... had committed mutiny. The simplest, most innocent concepts turned overnight into enemies, capable of triggering full system shutdown. Light is not light but energy. A person will never see his own face, just its reflection, or a photograph of it. Brain waves are more active during dreams than waking life. Roses don't smell beautiful; they smell like ripe fruit, which is good for survival, and so they're defined as beautiful in our aesthetic beliefs.

A dinner party is the oldest experiment. Trap a bunch of souls in a room. Faces move like painted moons, rising and setting, as talk blows in from the east. The thunk and freckles of a hand slammed down on the table in laughter, the noise of a long night unscrolled like a map. Madeira and Roquefort. Paper towels for napkins. The maroon wall telephone rings: next round of folks on their way!

No one's here this time of year except caretakers: often alcoholic friends of the family who can't handle society, who hide and take care of mansions and animals. He

Many hours later, Elise and Jamey go home, after dancing and fire juggling and ice queens, and they never see Frankie again. He was reunited with his tribe. Everything that was odd and ungainly about him became beautiful in the right crowd.

She switches moods in a heartbeat not because she's out of control - she just doesn't care what it looks like to switch. She watches other people stay in moods just to seem committed to something.

There's a way to resolve chaos and that's to finish what was started, and every organism knows this emergency plan without being told.

The gravity of any location pulls citizens to its heart, organizing people by abstractly spiritual geography.

Seeing herself do this, Elise realizes she always knew she would give the fruit away, at this exact moment, to that girl, with this exact feeling in her heart.

She likes the mystery of that changeover, those fifteen minutes of sundown when the streets and trees and people and parked cars are delicate and immediate, every sound and smell and movement amplified by the lowest light or the lightest darkness. Even a city that's broken and dirty can, in that time, be divine and intimate.

New Year's Eve. It's a promise of a night. Single, married or widowed, in love, loveless or lovelorn, we all leave our apartments and pick through snow in high heels, or descend subway stairs in tuxedos, lured to wherever we're going--whether we know it or not, would deny it or not--by the kiss of a stranger.

Fucking, drinking, smoking, loving, living, freebasing, spending, laughing, crying, working, falling apart, kissing, writing, blacking out.

Isn't it crazy how anger sometimes feels like joy? Just a crash of blood through your heart.

It's amazing how a certain time in your life can seem to be a prelude, but when you look back, you realize it was a whole work, with a beginning, middle, and end.

It's like he never wanted anything, but only thought and fretted about what he should want, what other people wanted him to want.

I'll die for your sins if you live for mine.

I didn't know the exact trajectory of my breakdown, but I did know that I'd become weak, holding onto wildness, cherishing the idea of it the way you blow a dying fire.

So much of life is about standing on the curb, willing to see what rolls up.