Flight Behavior Quotes
"A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture."
"How one hard little flint of thrill could outweigh the pillowy, suffocating aftermath of a long disgrace."
"Right up to the day when hope in all its versions went out of stock, including the crummy discount brands."
"The heart had just one instruction left: run."
"Plenty of people took this way out, looking future damage in the eye and naming it something else."
"The shame and loss would infect her children too, that was the worst of it, in a town where everyone knew them."
"She could claim the tightness in her chest and call it bliss."
"No husband worth having is going to forgive adultery if it comes to that."
"Life was just one long proposition they never saw coming."
"The condition of the roof was not encouraging."
"Her guilty mind ran down a hundred alleys, wondering what he implied."
"Every tree on the far mountainside was covered with trembling flame, and that, of course, was butterflies."
"The Lord wants us to secure our hearts against things that lure us wrongly."
"The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure."
"You’re looking at one crazy man who has been asking that same question for twenty years."
"I guess God made butterflies for some reason, and He sure put a truckload of them down on us."
"If you woke up one morning, Dellarobia, and one of your eyes had moved to the side of your head, how would you feel about that?"
"Terrible, beautiful, it’s not our call. We are scientists. Our job here is only to describe what exists."
"What would Mrs. Noah do? Their house was becoming a boat, her family launched out to sea."
"Her specialty was business suits, if you can imagine. Mostly for women, but some older men still had their suits made to order, when I was little. Before they all went over to buying factory made at half the price."
"Every disaster proved useful for someone, it seemed, and flooding was good for the gravel business."
"I don’t know, because boys wear their clothes out faster?"
"The true meaning of Christmas is, Turn it over and look at the price tag."
"But what if there isn’t?" she persisted quietly.
"I’ve never been anywhere," Dovey pointed out, "but I could get to Mexico with the map app in my phone. It’s probably about the same size as an insect brain."
"You never know what’s important. He said he’s going to need assistants."
"I don’t think I believe in hell," she said. "It’s kind of going out of style, like spanking kids in school. Pastor Ogle never even mentions it."
"The human person cannot face up to a bad outcome, that’s just the deal. We’re all Cleopatra, like that Pam Tillis song. Cruising down that river in Egypt. Queens of de-Nile."
"You spend your days cutting up meat. How’s that saving lives?"
"You go for things, Dellarobia. That is you. When did you ever not?"
"Usually these butterflies go to Mexico for the winter. They’ve never come here before, in something like a million years, and now all of a sudden here they are. As you can see."
"I was running away from things. That’s the long and the short of it."
"I don’t know. I was so focused on my own little life. Just one person. And here was something so much bigger. I had to come back and live a different life."
"What we want is to be up close and personal with Dellarobia. Tell me about the first time you saw the butterflies. What did that feel like?"
"This phenomenon is very special to you. The story we’re hearing in this town is that you had a vision."
"Here was something so much bigger. I had to come back and live a different life."
"I think people are scared to face up to a bad outcome. That’s just human. Like not going to the doctor when you’ve found a lump."
"The task of science was a good deal larger than that. Someone had to explain things."
"The skeletal peach trees in their rows leaned into the slope with branches upstretched like begging hands."
"Just because he's the outsider, he has no say? Should we not read books, then, or listen to anybody outside this county?"
"I see new things. I’m not actually in charge of anything. I’m kind of a glorified secretary."
"It’s just knowing all there is to know about an animal. Like sheep, like you said. Little signs tell you a lot."
"They all came here for the winter, and they shouldn’t have, because the winter’s too cold here."
"The weather’s turned weird, Cub. Did you ever see a year like we’ve had?"
"Refusing to look at the evidence, this is also popular."
"People can only see things they already recognize."
"Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting."
"It’s like if every Friday you drove to Food King, but then one Friday you did the same as always, followed the same road signs, but instead of Food King you wound up at the auto parts store."
"It will only take a few degrees of change, global average, to knock our kind out of the running."
"Every loss she’d ever borne had been declared the Lord’s business."
"But here sat her lionhearted son. Maybe it wasn’t a decision, but something drawn from the soup of birth."
"This place was a museum of people’s second thoughts."
"Nothing stays the same, life is defined by a state of flux; that was basic biology."
"In Dellarobia’s childhood it plagued and compelled her, one word, like one silver dollar on the floor of a wishing well, begging to be plucked up but strategically untouchable. Unsatisfactory answers crowded the waters around it, she could measure her life in those: because you are too young, because it was his time, because it isn’t done, because I didn’t raise you to behave that way, because it’s too late, because the baby came early, because life is like that, just because."
"She did this all the time now. Imagined how he would see her while she stood at the stove cooking supper."
"Every night Preston and Dellarobia read from the manual about nourishing pregnant ewes, working their way up to milk fever and breech twins, the many things that could go wrong."
"Dellarobia felt an unaccustomed remove from all the children in terms of nose-wiping and pink-note threats, which were handled by the proficient Miss Rose and two helpers she’d wrangled for the day."
"Maybe they portend what is coming. Warmer temperatures correlate with rising infection rates."
"They did not tug unremittingly on her limbs, whine to be carried, or put her outer garments to use as a nose rag. This was quite something, being in charge."
"Dellarobia felt socked. The vision that ambushed her was of Crystal in the dollar store that day. How she’d looked, talking to Cub."
"Dellarobia felt a settling down of her lifelong plague of impatience. He did not claim that God moves in mysterious ways."
"The impulse to keep the hands moving, feeding tiny answers to vast demands."
"Cub was cutting firewood at Bear and Hester’s and called to say he was staying for supper, but Dellarobia declined to bring the kids over and join them."
"It was Friday night. She would fix something she and the kids favored like soup and fish sticks, and they’d watch some program from beginning to end."
"A person could think about doing away with herself. You make your bed, but you can't always keep lying in it. Getting older is no help, Dellarobia. You might forget whether you took your pressure pill ten minutes ago. But there's your regrets of thirty year ago, still just sitting there. A-looking you in the eye."
"I never really felt like a wife in this room, you know? Much less a newlywed."
"I honestly thought I was going to college. You'd find some nice girl and settle down. How come we can't say what's true?"
"You may live in this garden if you keep the grasses green, and I'll return in the cool of the day."
"You have a job to do, woman, and you are not doing it."
"Intangible things are outside your range? Can't you people be a little imaginative?"
"The earth is the Lord in the fullness thereof."
"If God is in everything, how could we tear Him down? A love for our Creator means we love His creation."
"This is evidence of a disordered system. This is a biological system falling apart along its seams."
"It was abnormally quiet outside, as if sound itself had been blanketed and extinguished."
"Probably there was no such thing, in a freak new world of weather."
"It's all impermanent, the square white corners of house and home, everything."
"Nothing, really, but walking away on your own two feet."
"They’ll lie there saying, ‘Hey, I didn’t make this mess, somebody else pooped this bed.’"
"Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward."