The Pact Quotes
Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" - Christopher Marlowe, "Hero and Leander
Let us embrace, and from this very moment vow an eternal misery together." - Thomas Otway, "The Orphan
"You get what you get. It’s like Halloween candy."
"He was my dog. I was the one who had to take care of it."
"You don’t want cataract surgery. Why not? I’d get rid of my contacts and I’ve already got the name of a good surgeon."
"You’d hate it. You’d have to grow your hair long and get a nipple ring or something like that."
"Here’s to my future." She drained the tea, and then, in a hurry, she left.
"That’s only because I’m hidden from the waist down in this mirror."
"You will not hire a defense lawyer for a crime that never happened."
"If I don’t, how can we expect Chris to?"
"It’s all right to cry," she said, repeating one of the zillion platitudes the ER psychiatrist had preached the night before.
"Nothing happened! Nothing happened," she repeated.
"She suddenly remembered the day Chris woke up and wound his arms around her neck, and she realized that he no longer had the breath of a baby."
"Gus took several deep breaths, then turned back toward the dining room table."
"Kate stood uneasily in the doorway of her brother's hospital room."
"It freaked her out to think about Chris in a rubber room."
What would make me happy," he said, "is knowing when the funeral's going to be.
"But I'm absolutely, positively not supposed to tell you that."
"Chris looked at her dark dress, at his father's civilian clothes."
"You can't keep me here," Chris said, stalking to the door.
"The inside of his mouth felt like sandpaper and his mind was wheeling."
"The day you're released, we can go to the cemetery," Gus promised.
"I think you were with Em when it mattered the most."
"But why don't you just say it? You think I'm going to watch Em get buried and throw myself off the nearest cliff!"
"She touched his hand, her own palm milk-soft."
"We, uh, appreciate your kind words and your support."
"They approached in a pack, a swelling, amorphous mass."
"Your daughter is dead. The police believe that Chris killed her."
"Chris huddled beside Emily, their hands twined together around the telephone receiver."
"That's not true. You forgot the time you poured nail-polish remover on my mom's bureau."
"It's like I have AIDS. No, scratch that. They'd probably be more accepting."
"Because I was there, and I wanted to do what Emily did, so I should have been able to explain what happened to make us want to commit suicide."
"I wasn’t going to kill myself. I was never suicidal."
"I thought that I could stop her. I figured that I’d be able to talk her out of it long before we got to that point."
"I could see that she had never been less than what I’d figured her to be. If anything, she was always better than I remembered."
"I’m not going to kill myself. I’m not suicidal."
"I wasn’t going there to kill myself. I was going there to save her."
"I’ve got to see him. I’ve got to get in to see him."
"I don’t think anyone’s ever died of it."
"You survive. You do what they couldn’t."
"You owe me double for this, Hector. Fucking things made me bleed."
"I don’t think I’ll be able to watch yours."
"I know you’re sore, I just want to look at you."
"When it happens in our town, it becomes our problem."
"Being a mother gives you a singular sort of vision, a prism through which you can see your child with many different faces all at once."
"If I do, I wouldn’t be putting my daughter first. And nobody loved Emily more than me."
"It’s just that there’s an awful lot of evidence there to explain away."
"Emily must have reworked the hands six or seven times, over a period of months. Said she couldn’t get them exact."
"And then all of a sudden he had pulled Emily on top of him, her legs falling open on either side of his hips."
"I was looking people right in the eye, and I wasn’t necessarily seeing them."
"When you love someone you let them take care of you."
"What if her whole life wasn’t all about me?"
"Being ‘pro-choice’ is a misnomer. There is not really an issue of choice at all."
"We’re going to need you as a character witness for Chris. Who knows him better than his own mother?"
"What do I have to do to make you see me?"
"Do you know what it’s like to give your whole self to a person, and your whole heart to boot, until you’ve got nothing left to give—and then realize that it still isn’t what they need?"
"You don’t decide something like that out of the blue."
"You can’t ruin this for me. Tonight is the first night in—God, I don’t know how long—that I’ve felt like I can handle this."
"Everything," Emily said. "My head. My heart."
"I told you," she said quietly, "because I didn’t know how not to."
"I’m not doing it to you," Emily answered softly. "I’m doing it for me."
"I would," he said, his heart breaking beneath the weight of the truth.
"Would you rather spend the rest of your life thinking about us, and remembering it as something totally perfect, or would it be better to let it get all screwed up and have that as your memory?"
"He loved Emily so much that life wasn’t worth living without her."
"We’ve been friends for about four years."
"She would have told me if something was bothering her. If she didn’t tell me, it was because she wasn’t upset about it."
"This wasn’t the first time he’d be saving her by letting her go."
"Time moved too quickly and impossibly slow all at once."
"On the one hand, he felt powerless in a world too big for him to alter; on the other hand, his world had shrunk to the head of a pin."
"He wondered why he felt like the road was crumbling beneath him, when he’d only been trying to drive slowly through a safety zone."
"Do you still have your key? You want to go on?"
"Either he let Emily have what she wanted more than anything, or he let himself have what he wanted."
"When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own."
"Teen suicide is seen as a joint statement of strength and despair."
"A girl who looks like a pretty normal teen but is just a little bit withdrawn might be suicidal."
"That simply means you’re mentally healthy."
"When you’re going to kill yourself, the last thing on your mind is getting a refund."
"I loved her more than anything in the whole world."
"What it’s like to love someone so much, that you can’t see yourself without picturing her?"
"She was expecting, he realized, great pain."
"You couldn’t live for very long without a heart."
"I can’t imagine loving someone so much you’d do anything they asked. Even if that happened to be murder."
"In this country, you can’t just take a gun and shoot someone. Even if they ask you to."
"Truth, you see, is in the eye of the beholder."
"I’m jealous of him. I can’t imagine loving someone so much you’d do anything they asked."
"Because the chances of him getting that close to someone again are very slim."
"And then it dawned on me—I wanted to congratulate you. Because you’ve seen something very unusual today. Something surprising that never, ever makes its way into a courtroom. You, ladies and gentlemen, have seen the truth."
"He was a failure. He even went so far as to walk away."
"The problem was, Emily couldn’t kill herself."
"In spite of Jordan’s last ditch efforts, a jury knew when it had been taken for a ride."
"For landing him in this stinking hole for seven months, seven months that he was never going to get back."
"Not a single member of the jury looked his way."
"It was as if all of a sudden this body did not belong to him anymore."
"And for the third time in his life, Christopher Harte fainted."