4.28.07

Happy (?) Memorial Day, everyone. Tonight, a very uncreative blog. I will simply be posting quotes from The Tenth Circle. Various quotes that changed my life. Enjoy. :)

“The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn’t yet been slammed in your face. For years, Trixie’s own parents had told her that she could be anything, have anything, do anything. That was why she’d been so eager to grow up – until she got to adolescence and hit a big, fat wall of reality. As it turned out, she couldn’t have anything she wanted. You didn’t get to be pretty or smart or popular just because you wanted it. You didn’t control your own destiny, you were too busy trying to fit in. Even now, as she stood here, there were a million parents setting their kids up for heartbreak.”

“Hope was a pathological part of puberty, like acne and surging hormones. You might sound cynical to the world, but that was just a defense mechanism, cover-up coating a zit, because it was too embarrassing to admit that in spite of al the bum deals you kept getting, you hadn’t completely given up.”

“She found herself studying him not in terms of who he was, but who he wasn’t.”

“When you fooled around without the feelings attached, it might not mean anything…but then again, neither did you. Trixie wondered if there was something wrong with her, for not being able to act cool and nonchalant, like none of this mattered anyways, is that really what guys wanted? Or was it just what the girls thought the guys wanted?”

“When she stood next to him, he smelled of rum and indecision.”

“She wondered if they knew that their patient was a husk, a shell left behind by a snail because home didn’t fit anymore. You’d think someone who’d been to medical school would be able to hear through a stethoscope that somebody was empty inside.”

“You see outfits like those in fashion magazines, outfits so revealing they bordered on porn. Women glanced at those photo spreads and wished they looked that way, men glanced at them and wished for women who looked that way, and the sad reality was that most of those girls were not women at all, but all girls.”

“You couldn’t have strength without weakness; you couldn’t have light without dark; you couldn’t have love without loss.”

“What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you’d never forget?”

“The saddest day in the world will be the one when she stops pretending.”

“Teenage girls want guys to be attracted to them, but no one’s taught them how to deal with the emotions that come up with that stuff.”

“There was a fine line between love and hate, you heard that cliché all the time. But no one told you that the moment you crossed it would be the one you least expected. You’d fall in love and crack open a secret door to let your soul mate in. You just never expected such a closeness, one day, to feel like an intrusion.”

“Like Daniel, Jason had learned the hard way that we are never the people we think we are. We are the ones we pretend, with all our hearts, we can’t become.”

“Disaster was an avalanche, gathering speed with such acceleration that you worried more about getting out of its path, not finding the pebble at its center.”

“Maybe you had to scrape bottom before you could push your way back to the surface.”

“Relationships always sounded so physically painful. You fell in love, you broke a heart, you lost your head. Was it any wonder that people came through the experience with battle scars? The problem with a relationship – or maybe its strength – was that it spanned a distance, and you were never the same person you started out being.”

“He was like some kind of soap opera actor whose tragic story line you fell madly for: beautiful to look at, but all the same, you knew what you were seeing wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.”

“Because the more you changed, the less of you there was.”

“It was not a coincidence, Trixie thought, that no and know sounded the same. You were supposed to be able to say the magic word, and that was enough to make your wishes – or lack of them – crystal clear. But no one over said yes to make sex consensual. You took hints from body language, from the way two people came together. Why, then, didn’t a shake of the head or a hand pushing hard against a chest speak just as loudly? What did you have to actually say the word no for it to be rape?”

“There were some people who hit your life so hard, they left a stain on your future. She understood how you might spend your whole life waiting for that kind of man to come back.”

“It was no coincidence that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: if you didn’t know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to fight for.”