Quotes from Jardine Libaire

I stood in my own field, wanting obligations to fall from me. This is one way of contemplating suicide, yet it's the exact opposite: what I wanted was to be alive, to escape all the damage, to shed it like snakeskin, to emerge pure and naked and laughing.

She'd half loved men, and they'd half failed her.

She thinks in wild gardens, and his thoughts are espaliered into an introduction with a thesis, then supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion. She

He remembers noticing his dad's shadow was shorter than the others, and he had a visceral sense his father was weaker than the rest, and that he was more dangerous as a weak person with a lot of power than a powerful person with a lot of power.

So many land mines in this new territory called adulthood. Talent has a window. Freedom sometimes becomes a trap. We may die before we finish our dreams. Acutally, that we die is a pretty big surprise by itself. We can't spend innocence without accounting. Relationships are contracts. We partner not just for love but because we become too weak to make it alone.

She caught him in his schoolboy mode, polite and dutiful, mailing letters to his grandparents and step-siblings, notes full of nothing written in perfect script. Yet he feels like she caught him so unaware and alone that she saw the other side, the wolf crawling through wreckage, through broken walls, cracked Venetian mirrors, dust, blood, a turned-over rocking horse - the child who doesn't know it's own name.

My heart perceived wildernesses of contradictions and impossible truths and mystical lies.

But in this life we take turns at being enchanting, then enchanted. First we play in the streets, unaware of the freedom burning in the sun on our hair and the cigarette in our mouth, unconscious of the daydreams we inspire. Then it's our time to sit at a window and watch, and we are moved.

But one day, the things that make you free start to keep you down.

I now doubted myself. Innocencce was finite and could not be regenerated. Like spinal fluid. I knew this because I had run out.

But Elise eclipses the woman from Jamey's future, the lady in tennis whites flashing her diamond as she drinks orange juice fresh-squeezed by a maid. A woman Jamey never quite believed in anyway.

Outside my window, truckers trucked, hookers fucked, cops cruised, kids smoked, elders yelled, invalids slept, spouses fought, lovers kissed, while I watched a pussycat playing with stars in a black room.

She didn't tell me how to live, and I didn't tell her how to die. We let sleeping dogs lie.

Tory smokes, sitting on the floor with her impeccable posture, the gang of disciples around her. A few are straight, two gay, a couple in between, none more beautiful than her, most of them broken, half parasitic and half delightful. She

She comes from fighters—her mom can drive a stick shift, smoke a cigarette, drink a soda, put on mascara, and deliver a smack to every member of the family without taking her eyes off the highway.

The dreaminess of the night shift is constant, and objects float - keys and coffee cups and Chinese containers and tissues. Time seems free to do what it wants.

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

No one asked Jamey to be the policeman and pastor of egos. Why does he think this is his obligation?