One Two Three Quotes
"History and memory are unreliable narrators, especially in Bourne."
"Before we were our mother’s or ourselves, we were one another’s."
"If memory’s so unreliable, what’s the point of even asking the question?"
"One of the sad things that happens when almost everyone dies is there aren’t enough people left who remember why."
"If you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss it."
"We understand instinctively that, like me, change is slow."
"The world is smaller than it ever was, and no matter what town they’re in, sixteen-year-olds want to leave it."
"It’s important for us to exercise our memories in Bourne, to stretch and strengthen them—like brain yoga or mind aerobics."
"You think you’re the only one whose mother is crazy?"
"Giving something a label and putting it in a box makes you feel like you’ve understood it."
"Everyone needs air, water, food, shelter, and clothing all the time, Monday."
"We’re all poor. We’re all poisoned. We’re all tired—of this place, each other, our options."
"Sometimes the only way out is wading over to the other side."
"River is normal. This is what normal looks like. Not normal for here, normal for out there, normal for everywhere else—bright, educated, untroubled, unworried. Whole."
"They said sorry like when you punch your sister, and she yelps, and you are glad it hurt her because she is annoying, but your mom says say sorry, so you say sorry, but you do not really care, and she knows it."
"It’s hard to explain something that’s completely foreign to the person you’re explaining it to but has always been true for you, like when you try to describe color to someone who’s blind or if you had to teach a frog to use its lungs when it had spent its whole life underwater using its gills."
"If you’re careful, and she is, muffins are entirely in your control."
"You can only chase your own demons, you know. You can’t chase your mother’s."
"Children are a pain in the ass. Look at your poor mother. No offense."
"Nothing gets by you. You’re sharp as a tack."
"There’s no place better to be a kid than the woods. No place safer."
"When you ask my mother what it smelled like, she says chemicals. When you ask her what the chemicals smelled like, she says death."
"You dumped a ton of shit in the river. And it turned out, among other things, it also caused congenital anomalies."
"Monday doesn’t seem a little… high-strung to you?"
"So we won’t sue them, buy them, or convince them. We’ll do it a different way."
"We have to stop them. Don’t say who, Monday, I’m getting to that. We have to stop Belsum."
"Because what happened in Bourne is not his fault."
"We know it exists. That’s the important thing. Now all we have to do is find it."
"You prayed for death, poison, and destitution?"
"But some things you know right away, you know?"
"We can’t afford to stand on principle, Nora."
"You were right. We can’t just let them back like nothing happened. Everything happened. They have to know we know it. They have to know we’re watching this time, paying attention."
"Sometimes it’s important to remember things the way someone worked really hard for you to remember them, rather than the way they actually were."
"If Mirabel can smile in the face of such soul-crushing constriction, my dead end doesn’t look so bad."
"Life is kicking my ass up and down Main Street. How are you okay? How do you do it, Mirabel?"
"It’s not that the well-connected, well-endowed, and powerful don’t have troubles. It’s that they’re so much more likely to have earned them than the ones who are isolated, poor, and defenseless."
"I have only the best interests of Bourne at heart."
"I have confidence in your professionalism. I like people who are good at what they do."
"Nothing ever changes around here, except my waistline, of course."
"You’re such a big boy, Matthew. I’m so proud of you."
"You’d think she wouldn’t because it can’t be sanitary. You’d think I wouldn’t because she does."
"There are so many people who have sinned a little and a lot."
"We did well to buy up so much land so inexpensively and sell on the upswing."
"I’d never be interested in someone as pathetic as you."
"But my father, well, his goals were different from mine."
"We need to decide—if this is a risk we’re willing to take as a town in exchange for what Belsum is offering."
"It would be nice to march over to the library and wave the deed to the dam in Nathan Templeton’s face."
"They’re flagitious. They’re pernicious. Their specious claim that they’re innoxious now is a spurious one."
"My dotage, decline, and eventual demise will be much less depressing if I’m leaving a world without Belsum in it."
"History and memory are unreliable narrators."
"It’s hard to remember the past when it won’t pass."
"Sometimes bad things happen. It’s no one’s fault."
"It’s possible to want two things at once, you know. Even opposite things."
"Even if everyone votes the right way, I will still be this way."
"Independent testing does not prove anything if the independent tester is your roommate from college."
"It’s hard to argue Nora can’t fight while she’s moving on just because those things are opposites."
"History is more than just the past. It’s what we choose to remember."