The One I Left Behind Quotes
"It began with the hands. Right hands, severed neatly at the wrist."
"The medical examiner told the police to look for a surgeon or a butcher, someone who knew bone and tendon."
"The killer kept the women alive for exactly four days after the removal of the hands."
"On the fifth morning, he strangled them, then left their bodies displayed in public places."
"THE FIRST THING SHE does when she wakes up is check her hands."
"She hears Neptune breathing and it sounds almost mechanical, like the rasping rhythm of it."
"It didn’t need to be this way," Neptune says, head shaking, clicking tongue against teeth, scolding."
"The year was 1985. Madonna’s "Like a Virgin" was pumping out of every boom box."
"Brighton Falls, northwest of Hartford and just south of the airport, was a farming community that had quickly given way to suburbia."
"Imagine that your house is on fire. You have exactly one minute to grab what you can. What do you choose?"
"For a building to be successful, it had to be connected to the landscape in a seamless way."
"Reggie’s earliest memory of her mother began with her mother balancing an egg on its end and ended with Reggie losing her left ear."
""Wake up, worry girl." "Mom?" "Maybe. Or maybe I’m someone else. Old Scratch coming to get you.""
""This is the man who’s going to change everything," Vera said. "I can feel it.""
"Reggie dreamed of machines. Of cogs and wheels and batteries."
"My mom told me. It was back when they were in high school. Bo was like this big football star then."
"I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I figured it was a mistake, you know? Someone set it down and left it by accident."
"That was Vera—ever resourceful, even homeless, even crazy."
"I’m sorry to say it, but any man who spends that much time with a bunch of wooden ducks is kind of a dud."
"Don’t hold it so tight. That’s it. Relax your arm. Now step into the swing."
"You have one minute to grab what you can. What do you choose?"
"Don’t think I don’t know what goes on in that garage of yours."
"Did you know I was the Aphrodite Cold Cream girl?"
"Sometimes we’re at the mercy of other people. We don’t even understand the power they have over us until it’s too late."
"Everything’s going to be okay. You just go back to bed."
"It wasn’t your fault, you know. I’m the one who made him do it. And it was my idea to run away after."
"Sometimes I wonder if you remember things the way they really were."
"We’re all a lot safer with George in the world, aren’t we?"
"We’re going to live in a real house. Maybe get some cats. Have a flower garden. A nice, normal life. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, love?"
"You should know I have only the best intentions as far as your mother is concerned."
"Sure," he said. "Go wait outside and I’ll send a cruiser around."
"You all have a good day, now," he said, eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses.
"Can you believe it?" Tara practically squealed.
"The words PROTECT AND SERVE engraved above the doors seemed, to Reggie, an impossible promise."
"WHEN WAS THE LAST time you saw her?" Reggie asked her aunt.
"Shit, Reggie, I just heard Neptune’s left another hand!"
"Do you know who he is, Mom? Do you know where he’s taken Tara?"
"THE COPS AREN’T GONNA do shit," Tara was saying.
"It’s her," she announced. "The hand belongs to your mom, Reg."
"COME ON, HOP IN. It’s a heap of shit, but it goes."
"REGGIE WAS ON HER back in a cave, someplace dark and airless."
"There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile," Vera whispered.
"The only things I know about any of those ladies are what I read in the paper."
"I’ll be right back," Reggie said, setting the lamp down.
"It’s almost a cliché: after a murderer is brought to justice, his neighbors and coworkers come forward in complete disbelief, saying what a nice guy he was. He went to work every day. Kept his lawn mowed. Seemed friendly enough. He blended in, camouflaging himself effortlessly, passing for normal."
"Talk about luck," Reggie said. This had been easy. Almost too easy. She didn’t like it when things seemed to fall into place so effortlessly—it made her suspicious.
"I wasn’t anywheres near the bowling alley that day and I’ve got witnesses to prove it."
"It doesn’t do any good," George said. "You think I haven’t done the same thing? Been over it again and again in my head, fantasized about all the ways we could have saved her? If onlys do no good, Lorraine."
"It doesn’t matter," Reggie said, grabbing the program from Tara and dropping it back on the pile. "I’m sure whoever he is, he doesn’t even know I exist."
"My mom’s. The trunk is full of all her old stuff, but there’s nothing helpful. I thought if I looked carefully, there’d be something, some little shred. Some clue."
"Sometimes," Tara said, "sometimes it’s all just too much, you know? All the fucked-up stuff going round and round in my brain."
"He wasn’t anywheres near the bowling alley that day and I’ve got witnesses to prove it. Vera didn’t want nothing to do with me. Truth is, we were on kind of rocky ground even back before I got arrested."
"I’ve learned the secret," Tara said, smiling impishly. "I can stop them now. We both can."
"If you go out in the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise."
"All her life she thinks she doesn’t fit in; then she grows up and sees that she’s really a beautiful swan."
"The people we serve, they haven’t had the happiest lives."
"They’re able to regenerate appendages lost in battle."
"Choices, that’s what life comes down to, isn’t it? We’re each in charge of our own destinies, Reggie, whether we realize it or not."
"The hand is a map. The Gypsies, Greeks, Chinese, Egyptians, Hebrews—they all knew it."
"It’s all about connections. There’s a big web linking all of us together—you and me and the president and the guy who build the goddamn atom bomb. Don’t you feel it?"