The Cloisters Quotes
"I would have worked two jobs and paid them to be there."
"What had appealed to me about academia was that it seemed like a place where I could be blissfully free of trends."
"It was the kind of world that would continue to offer up surprises, no matter how familiar I became with it."
"I couldn’t help but envy the people around me, their futures—at least for the next few years—secure in blue-chip graduate programs."
"No one wanted to hear what loss was really like."
"I longed to close my eyes and inhale the mixture of lavender and thyme until it erased the smell of Michelle de Forte’s office."
"We have a tendency to discount things we don’t understand."
"Just don’t let it wear you down. Make it sharpen you instead."
"The way he solicited our opinions on his research, the way he valued my language skills, often handing off translations to me, fully confident in my abilities."
"Everywhere, people were dressed in pinstripes and Yankee caps: young families, drunk college kids, Japanese tourists, a guy hawking bootleg hats—a sea of bodies, suffocating and idiosyncratic."
"That the city swung wildly between these two extremes—joyful chaos and the workaday—made me desperate to experience it all."
"It was vibrant and loud—car stereos and music spilling out of bodegas, people on stoops laughing and playing music of their own."
"The way he inhabited my space was always a little unnerving, taking up too much of it, like it wasn’t mine, but his."
"Neither of us spoke. I was worried that anything I might say could give me away, reveal me as a fraud."
"I still struggled to get a bead on when Leo was kidding and when he was being serious."
"Chivalry was very big in the Middle Ages, wasn’t it?"
"That’s because there aren’t many of us left."
"I don’t know who I’m looking for, I said after a minute, both to fill the silence and because it was true."
"I watched him play that night, from the wings of the stage. The sound so loud, it transformed into noise—a banging and an aching."
"I knew I was right about you, Leo said, blowing out a thin stream of smoke."
"Sometimes, under the Gothic arches and among the funerary sculptures, it seemed as if the eyes of the statues were following me."
"Children stood on the big metal grates set in the floor, enjoying the novelty of the cool air running up their legs."
"The smell of lavender and the brush of the grasses against my skin could not calm me."
"The house used to be busy all summer, but it’s slower these days."
"We’re all just in a holding pattern, waiting for Rachel to decide what she wants to do."
"I was scanning for one that was relatively normal when I saw them—a pair of dice."
"The house belonged to my maternal great-great-grandparents."
"I had never stayed anywhere as nice as Rachel’s house at Long Lake, neither a hotel nor someone’s home."
"In the kitchen, the next morning, we sat at the counter, drinking our coffees black with our bare feet curled under us."
"I think I do believe that people can tell the future."
"I’m so sorry, It was a deeply inadequate statement."
"I don’t know what will become of my life, and I’m the one living it."
"But I don’t know why anyone wants to know how their story ends."
"It was like being inside a tree—it even smelled of pine pitch and campfire smoke."
"The floatplane pilot tapped me on the arm and gestured for me to take off the headphones."
"It’s been a long time, Margaret, since the house was like that."
"I think, if it’s real at all, that women would be better at it than men."
"And because of how much my mother loved this place, we always came here, nowhere else, for the summers."
"I was so cold I couldn’t work my jaw open to call out."
"It’s okay, Rachel said as we followed the trail of her flashlight. This is the way. You can trust me."
"We were in the tapestry room, where massive, thickly woven textiles depicted scenes of idyllic medieval life—a carpet of flowers sprung to life, a unicorn at rest."
"I had never been in this section of The Cloisters. It was grassy and walled off from the rest of the museum."
"He led me by the hand across the Bonnefont Cloister and through a gate that read STAFF ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT."
"You can finish, Rachel said. I can wait around the corner."
"I watched them tack back and forth up the lake, but of course, that happens a lot around here before the thunderstorms move in and the winds come."
"Rachel was found wearing it. There was only one life jacket on board."
"You must be prepared, be accepting of this. And may your desires align with the will of the cards, for only one will reign."
"I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer, but Rachel shrugged."
"The house was like a mausoleum; quite literally in the case of The Cloisters."
"You could be disappointed, sometimes devastated, by the results."
"I thought it was an homage to anarchism, a punk sentiment turned life motto."
"The realization crystallized in me—that we were all out for our own best interests."
"Nothing could make me give up being on this side of the door."
"Objects that aren’t rare enough, aren’t high quality enough."
"Art begetting art. It’s kind of beautiful if you think about it."
"Climbing out of the dusty places from which we had begun, destined for bigger things."
"The worst thing I could do wasn’t turn in Leo. It was waste this opportunity."
"I trusted them, in many ways, more than I trusted myself."
"We’re all animals, after all, just trying to pass the time."
"You just look like someone who is running from something."
"You’ll make it. I thought I’d never fully get away, but I did."
"They always say they’ll find you, but they rarely do."
"Summer was over. The world we had built had crumbled."
"Relationships like ours, worlds like that—they can’t withstand the pressure from the outside."
"What could I tell Detective Murphy? That Rachel had created a complex morality where she felt absolved because there was always a choice for her victims."
"It hadn’t been my fault. That fate had been meant for me, it was always going to find me, no matter how long I hid from it."
"I knew very few people would believe. After I took a nap and showered, we drank too many bottles of cheap wine."
"The overall shape of our life is not ours to decide. That shape belongs to fate."
"Luck, probably from the Middle High German word glück, meaning fortune or happy accident."
"I could finally see the truth. My father had been right all along."
"We are both masters of our fate and at the mercy of the Moirai—the three Fates who weave our futures and cut them short."