The Pallbearers Club Quotes
"Most of me ached to turn around, to return to homeroom, to give up on this foolish idea, to forget it ever occurred to me."
"There was another part that realized this was a Robert Frost path-choosing moment."
"By the time I swung open the creaking metal door of the AV room, my resolve leaked away, literalized as flop sweat."
"Most of my male classmates called me by that nickname, which I never had the option of approving when it was pinned to me at age eleven along with another kid’s fist to my big nose."
"The condition had been discovered later than it should’ve, as I somehow slipped through the cracks of the embarrassing annual scoliosis checks during gym class."
"I was six feet tall, having grown six inches in the prior eighteen months."
"My guidance counselor, Mr. Brugués (he of the novelty fish ties, walrus-thick ’70s mustache, overstarched dress shirts, and brown-bag lunches that were always open and left half-eaten on his desk), said my grades were great but I didn’t have any extracurricular activities."
"I stood in front of the camera, trapped under a mini spotlight that might as well have been a heat lamp from the cafeteria."
"I uttered a silent mantra in my head: This is so you can get into college."
"Instead of practicing what I was going to say while awaiting the go signal, I uttered a silent mantra in my head: This is so you can get into college."
"I knew that was trite, but why didn’t we talk about this more?"
"How was this a natural thing? How was this allowed and tolerated, never mind celebrated?"
"I wondered how old she was. Twenties? Early thirties? What had it felt like when her heart stopped beating?"
"The other man in a black suit rooted through a brown paper bag and offered me half of his ham sandwich, slathered in radioactive yellow mustard. I hated mustard."
"I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening listening to the tape."
"Despite the chorus of groans, wails, and laments that she was no longer our favorite teacher, she encouraged us to be creative and have fun."
"Punk is dead. You missed it. Bad luck, man. Long live punk."
"I despaired, thinking we’d never find the sources I needed for my paper on the other Mercy Brown, a New England Vampire."
"Would anyone ever go looking for Julia Walton, who, at age seventy, died after a six-month illness, no occupation listed, but devoted her life to acts of charity that were described as 'spontaneous acts of a kindly heart'?"
"The erasure of familial and cultural memory of any one individual was simply a function of time."
"Hope is believing there’ll be another moment of joy, and despair is knowing there won’t be one more."
"The unexplained means it just hasn’t been explained yet."
"My voice won’t record because I’m a vampire."
"Consumption is more descriptive than tuberculosis."
"We all lived in fear of the disease because it ran through families and whole towns like wildfire."
"They said one of us three Brown women were coming back at night and eating the living tissue and blood of Edwin."
"When people become desperate, it’s human nature to assign blame to someone."
"The rest of the ride into the city was candy apple gray."
"I was going to emerge from the surgery physically transformed. Maybe not quite a butterfly poking through a chrysalis, but my kyphotic, cowering body would be radically altered/reconstructed by this time tomorrow."
"Our head clocks are often the Salvador Dalí melting kind. Which, ironically, is closer to the truth of time."
"The pain dove deep, agony units measured in fathoms and Mariana trenches."
"No one properly warned me. Had I known, I would’ve stuck it out with my question-mark existence."
"It’s as though my adult years were never really there. And that terrifies me more than anything else that has been detailed in this book so far."
"I didn’t want to make our brief conversation about me. And what is he supposed to say to something like that anyway?"
"There’s joy in there too. Somewhere. The joy is harder, maybe impossible, to describe, which is probably how it should be."
"I couldn’t stop eyeballing the empty shadow space between its legs and the floor."
"Our new advancing ages turn us all into cowards eventually."
"How about a mixing straw? I loved chewing on them."
"My social media and White Pages search for her wasn’t getting me anywhere."
"It is a blah kind of early November afternoon in New England."
"I make the ninety-minute drive to the College Hill area of Providence with every expectation I will find Mercy."
"I’m the future natural disaster to be avoided."
"The Baptist church is a painted-white, U-shaped amalgam of buildings, slyly crouched and beckoning like a carnival huckster."
"I wait for her to say something else to stop me, to keep me. Nothing."