Marlena Quotes
"Tell me what you can’t forget, and I’ll tell you who you are."
"Sometimes, late at night, when I’m fumbling with the key outside my apartment door, my eyes meet my reflection in the hallway mirror and I see her, waiting."
"We’re pretending to be girls with minor secrets, listening to Joni Mitchell with the volume turned up."
"I love this wildness. I crave it. So why, when something in me asks if it’s worth ruining my life over, do I hear No?"
"The first time I saw Marlena Joyner, Jimmy and I were unloading a U-Haul."
"Whenever I hear the word danger, I see Marlena and me staring into the mouth of that U-Haul in the winter hour between twilight and dark."
"The act of watching changes what happens. Just because you don’t touch anything doesn’t mean you are exempt."
"I’ve never believed in the idea of an innocent bystander."
"Privilege is something to be aware of, to fight to see beyond, but ultimately to be grateful for."
"Certain things are. Abusing a position of power, I would say, for example."
"I’m so glad you’re in our class," Tidbit said, twisting away from him.
"I think it’s pretty common for teenagers to fantasize about dying young."
"Marlena, I haven’t even seen your mom in forever. I want to thank her for the groceries."
"You drink too much, Lena-bee. You drink like a grown man. Like a loser."
"But there aren’t words for the catastrophic dreariness of being fifteen in northern Michigan at the tail end of winter."
"The sky had turned hard and nickel gray, a color that, if you knocked on it, would make a tinny sound."
"Instead of public school, I had to have Concord Academy, with its courtyards a whirl of fall leaves, my initials monogrammed on my collar."
"If there were no men except Jimmy in the entire world, I wondered how much better life would be for me and everyone I loved."
"How can I describe the horrible pleasure of being not good?"
"We hadn’t talked about seeing Dad, except when she asked me if he’d set another time to meet. He had not."
"Drink to never forgetting, and drink, again, to the lie you tell when you say you won’t."
"But what about the stuff I intentionally try to forget?"
"I wanted to be her most important person, because she was mine."
"I was terrified. No matter how far I fell, something pulled me back to safety."
"You’re the best friend I ever had, so don’t get all hurt and big-eyed and take this the wrong way. But you don’t get it, and I’ve never expected you or anyone else to."
"I loved her, as my mom and as a person, for everything, for being the one who stayed."
"Sometimes days, weeks, months go by, and it’s like you never existed at all."
"Being an adult—it is not the same. It is not, actually, anything like what we wanted, what we imagined for ourselves. But, Marlena, mostly it’s better."
"Who can recognize the ending as it’s happening? What we live, it seems to me, is pretty much always a surprise."
"Everyone has a secret life. But when you’re a girl with a best friend, you think your secret life is something you can share."
"Marlena—look. I didn’t forget. I wrote it down."
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