The Tenth Circle Quotes
"This is how it feels when you realize your child is missing: The pit of your stomach freezes fast, while your legs go to jelly."
"Women who saw him with Trixie assumed that his wife had died, or that he was newly divorced."
"Did dogs know they were naked? Is adult supervision a power grown-ups use to fight bad guys?"
"He loved the fact that when Trixie was spacing out in her car seat and wanted attention, she always started with "Dad …" even if Laura happened to be driving the car."
"In spite of what he’d done, she’d still trusted him to keep her safe, to bring her home."
"When you stripped it down, it was also the story of a guy in the throes of a midlife crisis, a guy who was reevaluating the choices he’d made along the way."
"The best relationships were the ones where both sides went out of their way to make sure the other wasn’t disappointed."
"You might sound cynical to the world, but that was just a defense mechanism, cover-up coating a zit."
"The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn’t yet been slammed in your face."
"He understood that the person you were yesterday might not be the person you are tomorrow."
"There’s nothing wrong with you," he said, that first lie a fissure crack in his heart.
"I know that no one deserves to be raped, no matter who she is and what she’s been doing," Janice said.
"You need to see a doctor, Trixie. I’ll stay with you, the whole time."
"You’re already being very brave. All I’m going to ask you to do is keep that up."
"I think he scratched me when I was fighting."
"If a rape is reported, there’s a 50.8 percent chance that an arrest will be made."
"Sometimes it helps to get it all out," Janice suggested. "Play an instrument. Scream in the shower. Write it all down in a journal."
"You’re going to feel a little pressure," Dr. Roth said, folding Trixie’s legs into the stirrups, a human origami that left her stark and open.
"Explaining hell took on a whole new meaning when you’d been recently living smack in the middle of it."
"There was a fine line between love and hate, you heard that cliche all the time."
"In all honesty, she had no idea if Daniel took it with milk or sugar or both."
"With the exception of Dante, nobody chose to go willingly to hell."
"The irony of having to draw this, given his own situation, had not been lost on Daniel."
"It was easier to face down a blank page than to pull from thin air the right words to rebuild a marriage."
"The law was not going to protect his daughter, which meant that he had to."
"The law says that a victim’s credibility can be questioned."
"What if love wasn’t the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?"
"One word might have spread like fire. One word might have saved them both."
"Disaster was an avalanche, gathering speed with such acceleration that you worried more about getting out of its path, not finding the pebble at its center."
"If they didn’t, they ran the risk of losing - by comparison - the memory of who Trixie used to be."
"It was a catch-22: If you didn’t put the trauma behind you, you couldn’t move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened."
"Maybe you had to scrape the bottom before you could push your way back to the surface."
"Forgiving and forgetting were fused together - flip sides of the same coin - and yet they couldn’t both exist at the same time."
"What Trixie wanted, most of all, was what she couldn’t have - to go back to being the kind of girl who worried about things like science tests and whether any college would admit her."
"Relationships always sounded so physically painful: You fell in love, you broke a heart, you lost your head."
"There were snows here in Maine, though, that didn’t have equivalent terms in Alaska."
"When you die, you don’t get to catch snowflakes on your tongue."
"We remember him for the way he could make us laugh with a joke and the devotion he applied to everything he did."
"The best decisions in a marriage were based not on honesty but on the number of casualties that the truth might cause, versus the number saved by ignorance."
"You never knew what you were capable of until you arrived at that given moment."
"It's sort of interesting to think that Dante wouldn’t have put Jeffrey Dahmer as deep in hell as he would Macbeth."
"People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was in front of their eyes."
"Reality check, she would say. Santa’s a phony. Your parents lied to you. And, she might add, they’ll do it again."
"Maybe it wasn’t even a mammoth but a quugaarpak."
"You have to clear your mind of the thoughts of the animal, the old man used to say, or he’ll see you coming."
"He felt as if he were picking up the thread of a life he had forgotten weaving and being expected to continue the pattern."
"Who knew better than Daniel that everyone had a beast inside, that sometimes it came out of hiding?"
"Daniel would find Trixie, even if it meant he had to walk across every mile of Alaska to do it."
"Trixie wondered if her father knew this sort of stuff too, if elemental knowledge about living and dying might be underneath all the other, ordinary things he knew."
"If you asked me to get up in front of a jury, I couldn’t tell them conclusively that these two hairs came from the same person."
"She thought of the ladders she’d cut on her arms, the way she’d wanted to feel real pain instead of the hurt gnawed on her heart."
"It wasn’t what you didn’t know about the people you loved that would shock you; it was what you didn’t want to admit about yourself."
"It wasn’t like a blanket you could just pull over yourself; you had to burrow down and think warm thoughts and hope for the best."
"Maybe it took realizing that you could die to keep you from wanting to do it."
"Don’t worry, I think that it’s got enough alcohol in it to qualify as cleaning fluid."
"What you said was not what you meant, and vice versa."
"It was entirely different, she realized, when the choice was up to her."
"Heat rose off Trixie’s skin in the shape of her soul."
"I’d pretty much like to see anything that’s somewhere other than here."
"Because you’re like that fairy. The one who hangs out with Peter Pan."
"The best part about his friendship with Cane was that Cane was an insider."
"You did what you had to, for the people you cared about."
"Fastening and tucking seemed so much more intimate than unbuttoning and unzipping."
"But no one ever said yes to make sex consensual."
"She wondered how trees became petrified, if the same process worked with a human heart."
"You’d do whatever it took to protect your child."
"Her eyes filled with tears. "But you’re lying," she whispered."
"What made a hero a hero? Was it winning all the time, like Superman?"
"I’ve got evidence that puts her at the bridge."