The Monsters Of Templeton Quotes
"It was one of those strange purple dawns that color July there, when the bowl made by the hills fills with a thick fog and even the songbirds sing timorously, unsure of day or night."
"In my delirium, I thought I could see my mother inside with a few lifetimes of family antiques and the gentle ghost that lived in my childhood room, all traced like bones on an X-ray, delicate as chalk."
"As the night thinned around me, I leaned over and retched."
"I felt the world around me creak and strain, snapping apart, fiber by fiber, like a rope pulled too tautly."
"When he saw the large and terrible eye still milking over with death, the good doctor blinked. And then he fainted."
"Only in recent years did such coolness arise between Vi and me."
"The world as I knew it was always just about to end; we were fragile; I was fragile."
"In the spring of 1785 I left my family in New Jersey and traveled into the vast and melancholy wilderness of New York to survey and lay my name on the place that has since made my fortune and renown."
"We run; we like to run; we have run together for twenty-nine years now; we will run until we can run no more."
"It was a prematurely snowy Thanksgiving, and while my mother worked one night, Clarissa and I went to a candlelight festival at the Farmers’ Museum, where the snowbanks were carved into cups and held flickering votives, so that the snow was lit from within by golden orbs of light."
"There is something in the rhythm of the run that tells them, something that spreads our sorrows into the heads of the others and gives us some solace, though unspoken."
"My mother and I held an odd relationship with the town, as we were the last remnants of its founder, Marmaduke Temple, and direct descendants of the great novelist Jacob Franklin Temple, whose novels we read every year in high school."
"I dreamt at night of being so big I could march down Main Street, grinding our enemies under my furious ogre’s feet."
"My mother looked at me and then sighed. 'Willie,' she said. 'I’m sorry. I’m so tired. Tell me now what happened so I can get some sleep, and we’ll deal with it later.'"
"I told her one version of the story, vastly abridged."
"I will accept no bourgeois striver, no paycheck-whore, no infernal attorney, editor, bachelor they’re so intent on introducing me to, I will have an artist, I will be the wife of a genius, or I will be a fierce spinster, dedicated to intellect…"
"I must save the town, it is repeated in my head, a refrain, a Greek Chorus! I must save the town!"
"My brain is only suited for literary analyses, not for such mundane and essential problems as this!"
"These nights, I dream of Templeton, Lake Glimmerglass, my lake like ice on the tongue…"
"I do think something terrible would have happened, but I was so maddened I broke away…"
"I was as beautiful as I could be… a petty thing to do, to be sure, to show him what he’s losing by choosing Manhattan over our small and lovely Templeton…"
"We stood before one another like this for a long time…he moved forward, grinning…but I stopped him, hand against his shirt, feeling the heart beat hard in my hand…"
"Even for the pain, there was a great deal of pain…my lipstick smeared on his face…awoke to see him gazing at me in the dawn light, moving a curl back behind my ear…it is true…he does love me…"
"I knew I would be filled with this new person until the wedding, this warm person with happiness inside of her."
"The child I have in me already will be born, maybe more. And the ghosts in the lake will rise and follow me, calling, until the day…"
"That’s really not so good for you. Extra sugar."
"The housemaid had found a list of all the people who had ever died in the lake in Sarah’s room."
"The world is falling apart faster than we can catch up."
"I am a terrible person—I will go to hell. But now that I have told, they are leaving, I feel them drawing away—what relief."
"I am eager to kiss the cheeks of your nephew. I do suppose he is bald at this young age, is he not?"
"Perhaps we can become friends, Ginger. I am lonely."
"We need you in town, Cinnamon; I heard Nat Pomeroy is looking for a rich wife."
"I don’t know what to do, Charlotte. It is morning—I am still in my clothes from last night—I simply don’t know what to do."
"I feel as if I’m breaking. There is something wrong with me."
"Don’t you know how sad I am, how lonely? Don’t you know anything?"
"We must be Christian and believe that it is someone who is troubled and is in need of the Lord to help."
"I am sure you can’t give a whole town to your daughter, but your family has so much history here that you couldn’t not come back."
"Your gossips are correct. I am returning to Templeton."
"In Templeton, we will be acquaintances, civil and cold."
"I will not salute you, for this is our last missive."
"The women’s script was wildly different and the papers were different, too."
"The town was cold, and it must have been winter, but it was still pulsing with life."
"I was distracted, hadn’t even seen that I’d eaten an entire wedge of quiche—a food I despise—until she came back to pick up the tray, and chuckled with surprise to find it gone."
"I am not the kind of person who does existential crises."
"You’re not saying, he said, that I’m the father?"
"But at fourteen, I didn’t know how to speak to young men, young women; I didn’t know I even had the right to look at a girl in admiration."
"Late, my father became a Tory. If I had doubts at the time, I kept them to myself."
"That did it; I threw the currycomb to the yawning stableboy, and followed my father and Peck out into the night."
"For hours, as night spooled long, I sat in the silence, weak, eaten by grief."
"The black spot on my soul is this: it was relief."
"My journal accepted what I felt when I watched my mother mourn for the absence of her favorite, my younger brother."
"I would leave his girls fatherless. I would bloody my hands."
"I knew I had to protect her from what I knew. Though it left a terrible, bitter taste in my mouth, I would have to swallow my disgust with my father."
"I love you, Vi, but sometimes I think I hate you a little, too."
"Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state."
"I didn’t start to cry. It’s all over if I start to cry."
"The blood was excessive menstruation. The rest, well."
"The brain is sometimes much, much stronger than the body, and can sometimes trick the body into believing it is wrong."
"I did lose something. I feel as if I did lose something, Vi."
"You have to go back. Finish your dissertation, get the heck out of Dodge."
"You’re not a quitter. You’d be devastated if you let yourself quit."
"I didn’t send you to school for more than half my life to have you wimp out just before the end."
"I am happiest when I’m fighting for something," she said. "And you get that from me."
"I could have saved him. I could have prevented him from going out. I did not."
"Through not warning him, through not commanding him to stay home. I, bone-cold in my big house, killed him."
"I waited for the men to bring him home, for our bloodhound to boom his sorrow into the night."
"It was only a few hours, but it felt like an ocean of time."
"The rain stopped near eight, and the frogs emerged in lusty choir."
"TESTMENT FROM MASTER GUVNOR AVERELL, ON DECEMBER 24 1799."
"I put the paper down and took one big breath."
"Revise the vision: Vivienne young, blasted with acne, on a bus roaring home from San Francisco."
"Whoops," she said, beaming down at his gray summer wool suit. "Who are you?"
"You must forgive me for asking," he said. "But I am. I have a lot of. Well, I do have money, and if this is a way to get..."
"The air through my windows smelled fresh, pine-clean."
"We will swim on Lake Glimmerglass on the Fourth of July next summer, take out all our motorboats and float in the lake."