Thistlefoot Quotes
"People talk. How they talk! What I can tell you for sure is that I was born already running. I’m still running. I don’t plan to stop."
"We live in the woods. It’s him or Aiden at this point, and I’m not fucking Aiden. No offense."
"The truth was, she had been doing well. She’d been surprised at how sweet a life she’d found up north."
"A horn from a passing barge jerked Bellatine back into the shipping yard. No. Enough."
"The house is fitted with windows of thick, warped glass. The light turned milky as it fell through them, illuminating columns of dust, silver and swirling like smoke."
"Imagine! Imagine if I, a foreigner, came into your city and claimed to do your job better than you. It’s outrageous, no?"
"Nope, no way, I’m out." Bellatine yanked her arm free of Isaac’s grip and started marching toward the exit.
"In the afternoons, Bellatine foraged for river clay and moss to refresh the mortar that bound wooden panels into walls."
"The puppets were all roughly a foot and a half tall, hand sewn from cream-colored muslin."
"Some of the characters had hands or feet or faces of whittled basswood, oiled dark."
"Many of the puppets wore tiny goat-hair toupees and clothes stitched from old lace and thrifted linens."
"Each tenderly devised by their mother’s needle and paintbrush."
"The wooden accoutrements bearing thousands of small marks from their father’s dedicated carving knife."
"Quick as a snake, Isaac lifted the Moon from the box and tossed it toward Bellatine."
"Do it, Tiny," her brother whispers. A heartbeat, a singe, and the Tailor twitches."
"Bellatine is fourteen. There’s dried blood between her fingers."
"This is how you are with people, isn’t it?" she snapped."
"But in Isaac’s experience, the craft was more like fishing or hitchhiking."
"The tremors were bad today. Hands shaking too hard to be any use with the puppets."
"Does life, too, not progress in this manner?"
"But a folktale can never be forgotten because it wriggles and rearranges until it sits neatly on the heart."
"The audience had watched, enraptured, as the puppets moved across the stage, bathed in primrose light."
"Of course you glow! Everyone glows, you just can’t always see it."
"A black cat crossing your path signifies the animal is going somewhere."
"Life was uncertain; a little manufactured certainty didn’t hurt."
"A spark dug into the Girl with No Face, a small searchlight, frenzied as a smoked-out hornets’ nest."
"The very first time she’d set foot in the legged house, it had been as though she were a little girl again."
"Every coin comes back around. Maybe in the next year, maybe the next life."
"Awake in his bunk, Rummy couldn’t stop thinking about the smokefed. Their panic bubbled in his body like tar."
"Sparrow dreamt of home. Of church ladies in their finest Sunday hats, frothing with satin carnations and mesh veils specked with faux pearls."
"It is impossible to take a step without walking through a ghost. Every memory creates one."
"Across an ocean and one hundred years away, an army awaits its orders. It undulates like a single mass."
"The swarming sensation abated. But while the house could fix her body, it did nothing for her mind."
"The liquid plummeted down her throat, passing her esophagus, sliding below her lungs, her liver, her stomach."
"You've been dodging me." "Swell to hear your voice, too, Shona."
"You’re even more uptight tonight than usual. Is this about Fen?"
"Isaac squirmed with regret as soon as Thistlefoot plodded across the Louisiana state line."
"Things have always happened to me. Around me. But I’ve never joined them. Not until now."
"The only real way to respect people whose lives are over? You prove to them that you aren’t wasting yours."
"The real difference between being alive and dead, it’s this. It’s feeling things, tasting, smelling. That’s being awake."
"Every time something touches me, it feels like that part of me wakes up all over again to listen."
"I would be happy to lose my senses. Then I would no longer have to see the world as it is."
"Perhaps I am mad. If so, there are worse fates for women."
"I have only two solaces: One—ice cream. Two—Ice cream!"
"Sometimes I imagine coating my letters in glue, so that when you touch them, they stick to you."
"Wherever he went, whoever he became, the shadow would follow."
"He wasn’t a wry antihero, rakishly lovable... He was a fuckup. A bum. Good for nothing. Good for no one."
"In the distance he heard Tiny call his name, just as the legged house vanished under the curving horizon."
"Because Isaac doesn’t help anyone but himself."
"The painting was a prayer—someday, it begged, someday we’ll escape. Someday, we will dance."
"There is no such thing as a ghost of the dead."
"Vinyl against wood. The click of the road case opening."
"My final origin. This version, it is not like the rest."
"Come. Sit at my hearth, which burns and burns and does not stop burning."
"Nothing ever happens in Gedenkrovka. Nothing ever will."
"Sometimes the story you need is not the story you might want."
"A good zhyd cooperates with the tsar. Why hide if you trust in Russia?"
"Baba Yaga, everyone knows that the oldest recipes in Gedenkrovka are—"
"What has come to pass cannot be changed. But it can be told."