Bloomability Quotes
"Each time we moved, we had fewer boxes, not more."
"You just get on the train and off you go—presto! There in no time!"
"In the plane, you saw it all spread out beneath you, a living map, a wide, wide living photograph, and you were suspended above it and you knew where you were."
"It’s not a bomb. It’s military practice. They do it every weekend."
"I’d give my right arm to live here, all the time, all the whole year round."
"I’m not a kitten," I said, sliding out the side door.
"There were two prisoners in a jail cell. They each looked out the same small window. One prisoner said, 'Man oh man, what a lot of dirt!' The other said, 'Man oh man, what a lot of sky!'"
"Mrs. Stirling invited us to go to her house in Italy, did you hear her?"
"But she wasn’t anything like that at all. She took both my hands in hers and said I had a charming name and a charming face and she was enormously pleased that I was at her school, and she was enormously pleased that Uncle Max and Aunt Sandy were there, too."
"Just memorize," the teacher said. "Memorize."
"I'd picture a car with lipstick and a boat with a moustache, in order to remember which was feminine and which was masculine."
"Had my Grandma Fiorelli really spoken this language, and had she really not known any English when she’d come to America, and had it been hard for her to learn English?"
"It was easier for students to refuse temptation. They could say, 'No thanks, my parents would kill me if I got suspended/expelled.'"
"Voci bianche—that’s what we just heard. It means 'white voices.' Isn’t that a lovely way to put it?"
"I couldn’t understand her accent at first, but it didn’t seem to matter because she drew things and cut things out and shuffled them around and it made sense that way."
"I’m not trying to suggest that everything was perfect about this school, because it wasn’t."
"In one school I’d been in, I’d joined the choir, but after a week of rehearsals the choir director asked me if I would please just mouth the words. 'Don’t actually sing out loud,' he said."
"Sometimes I wanted to be the same, because then you’d have friends, and you wouldn’t be just the new kid, but inside, deep inside my bubble, I also wanted to be different."
"Uncle Max made a speech about how drugs and alcohol did not mix with education. He said we were here to learn. If we wanted to mess around with our bodies and our brains, we could do that somewhere else."
"I imagined my package sitting forlornly in the post office, or falling off a truck and rolling off the road and down a long hill."
"I loved them, but I’d never received anything like that before. They were so grand, and I didn’t deserve them, and I didn’t want to be so greedy for them, but I was."
"It might be hard to do—wait! That would be my struggle. I would struggle to accept their generosity."
"How did it feel? I wondered. Was it happy to have its roots in its own soil, or was it lonely, cut off from its mother?"
"It’s to prevent an avalanche. They toss some dynamite or something up there to loosen the snow so it tumbles down before it all piles up into a big dangerous lump."
"You could probably grade thinking, but it wouldn’t necessarily be fair grading, so we proposed that thinking should not be graded at all."
"I wondered what sort of person my parents might choose for me, if they were arranging my marriage."
"I was thinking, thinking, thinking all the time. At night sometimes I couldn’t turn off the thinking, and on it would go, into my dreams."
"I didn’t really want Lila to come. I was having trouble getting used to this new version of Lila."
"We took the train up to Andermatt, looping and winding back up the spine of Switzerland."
"It wasn’t true. I wasn’t doing great. I was still downfelling a lot, but it was good to hear him lie."
"I remembered a dusty road in Tennessee and a tall crooked evergreen in Ohio."
"Would I always remember cappuccino and pizza quattro stagione from Federales in Lugano?"
"It made me laugh. I had a little inside laugh down there under the snow."
"Warm air and strong sun embraced us by day, and rain cleansed the city at night."
"I had an odd feeling, as if I were aware of being a speck on this mountain, a speck in this wide scene, my little dot self, but also, simultaneously, I felt a part of it and above it and very, very free."
"We were an army of goodwill ambassadors, marching out into the world."
"Here we are, back in the woods, facing more forking roads. Where are we all going? How will we all meet up together again?"
"It seemed as if both words were needed, not just one or the other, because this was an end of something, and the beginning of something else."
"For a while, I sat on the bench near the driveway entrance, waving people off, and then there were no more taxis, there was no more noise."
"I thought about my fishing in the streams and wondered if I was carting not only my home along with me, but also my family, too."
"I didn’t know how I was ever going to be able to make the decision over the summer, about whether to stay in Bybanks or return to Switzerland. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, or what I should do."
"I was flying over the mountains and over the ocean, dipping and gliding and looping and turning. I could feel the air on my wings and I could see Guthrie beside me, flying along."