The Girls Quotes
"I have never looked into my sister’s eyes. I have never bathed alone. I’ve never been kissed like that. I’ve never driven a car. Or slept through the night. Never a private talk. Or solo walk. I’ve never climbed a tree. Or faded into a crowd. So many things I’ve never done, but oh, how I’ve been loved."
"My sister, Ruby, and I, by mishap or miracle, having intended to divide from a single fertilized egg, remained joined instead."
"Ruby and I share a common blood supply. Our thoughts are distinctly our own. Our selves have struggled fiercely to be unique."
"Ruby believes in God and ghosts and reincarnation. I believe the best the dead can hope for is to be conjured from time to time, through a note of haunting music or a passage in a book."
"I love my sister as I love myself. I hate her that way too."
"Write, as if you’ll never be read. That way you’ll be sure to tell the truth."
"A tornado touched down on the day Ruby and I were born."
"Holy Cross Church was the first Catholic church in Leaford, built by the French settlers."
"God makes bowel movements too, but I wouldn’t baptize one."
"In sleep, my sister and I found a common breath. In dreams, we knew the moon."
"If Aunt Lovey hated self-pity, she hated ingratitude worse."
"I think I found something of God in that."
"To be Christian is mean to love everybody."
"If you don’t gonna get baptize you don’t gonna glow, then God is don’t gonna see you in heaven."
"That’s why we should carpe diem (enjoy today because who knows about tomorrow)."
"Aunt Lovey said we were lucky because we were rare, and we shouldn’t mind when people stare."
"No one knows the precise moment of his or her death."
"I don’t really like to learn. I just like to know."
"You got no truck, Darlen? You walk all the way out from town? Come on in the house. I’ll get you some water, and we’ll talk about my cattle."
"She said our time was better spent cleaning out the silverware drawer."
"The air hardly stirred, so the wind couldn’t have blown them away."
"Then Ruby decided, by process of elimination, that if it wasn’t an animal or a vandal or the wind that took the peonies, it must have been a ghost."
"That night, Ruby slept for the first time in months."
"The kind of house a child will draw when she’s still in her stick-people phase."
"We were eager to accompany Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey to the house on Chippewa Drive each Sunday afternoon."
"Our cinder-block bungalow sits in the middle of Chippewa Drive."
"Having learned that life wasn’t always fair, and even less so for a girl attached to her sister."
"The truth is we never expected we’d get caught."
"I can close my eyes and still smell the mingling of musk and skunk and mildew."
"Aunt Lovey poured sympathy, drinking tea."
"I didn’t protest. Neither did my sister."
"After Mrs. Merkel read the poem, she looked at Rose like she’d stolen something."
"Rose has written a lot of poems about grief."
"The land was swamp, strewn with meadows of bergamot and thickets of trees."
"Uncle Stash pitched a few quarters into the metal mesh basket."
"I remember my pregnancy in freeze-frame photos."
"I shared the pregnancy with Ruby in surprising ways."
"We are dying. So are you. Some of you may even know it."
"You think about these words final last never a lot, and there are not many things, when you come right down to it, that you’ll be happy to see the end of."
"I have not had full-blown insomnia since my pregnancy, so, on the rare occasion, like now, that I’m awake all night, too preoccupied or worried to sleep, I remember those nights in Hamtramck."
"I am fearful that I’ll lose control of my body. I’m terrified that I’ll lose control of my mind."
"But lean became slender and slender became gaunt and gaunt grew emaciated."
"Even if we don’t make it to our birthday, people should dance."
"It never mattered to my sister and me that blue herons are not rare here in Leaford. They’re so elegant in profile, so graceful in flight, that Ruby and I have always stopped to watch."
"The truth is, I couldn’t deny I felt him watching us from behind the goldenrod and through the black eyes of the crows."
"I listened to her singing and looked through the window, the one near our bed, where bees tease pallid roses and the sun surrenders red."
"You can’t wish so well on overhead jet planes. And if you’re looking for poetic inspiration, nothing rhymes with 'helicopter.'"
"I’ve been watching Ruby sort through her things, grouping and piling and discarding and wrapping and labeling."
"This isn’t the _high_way," Ruby cried. "This is the low way."
"It’s just visit to family." "Visit from family they’ve never met before." "Still family."
"Different," Uncle Stash said, shrugging. "But better? Only God knows."
"The plane is not crashing." "It’s not that." "I am not having another heart attack."
"Something is always shocking. Plus, they know my girls are conjoined girls. Every year we send the pictures from school."
"When one sweet there is, I know what to take," Mr. Lipsky said. "When so many there is . . ."
"Say he asked too many questions and I killed him."
"It’s okay with the girls." "It’s not so steep as it looks. I climbed a thousand times when I was boy."
"This has been a bad year for hurricanes in the southern United States."
"Don’t worry if it’s not well written. It’s the conjoined-twin thing that’s gonna sell it or not."
"But Rose has been my sister. I think that’s heroic."
"I could not have been more loved, but I could have loved more."
"At least they’re not gushing from my heart. Or, God forbid, my ass."
"A bus driver can’t just drop people off and tell them to climb a hill!"
"I’m seventy-one years old!" Aunt Lovey shrieked. "You’ve had a heart attack! And did he not notice the girls?! He just left us all to climb?!"
"It’s because you wouldn’t go in the brown shack?"
"Don’t say it’s mother’s ashes." "Say it’s what, then? What kind of ashes should we say?" "Cigarette." "In an envelope? Plus, it doesn’t look like —" "Say it is ashes of animal, then. Family pet." "Dog ashes?"
"To bring the dead to life is no great magic. Few are wholly dead: Blow on a dead man's embers and a live flame will start."
"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
"Uncle Stash said, 'Girls. Good. Girls. But you,' he whispered, laying his palm gently on Aunt Lovey's back, 'you are not okay, my love. Are you? Are you?'"
"Autographs are worth hovno," Uncle Stash said.
"You’re the writer. You write something, okay?"
"We wondered if we might elicit gratitude or further scorn from Mrs. Merkel if she knew."
"I want this collection of words to transform themselves into visions of Ruby and me. I want to be remembered like long-ago friends."
"We grew up, finally, and without the Herculean effort I imagined it would require."
"They make eye contact with us instantly. And never ask personal questions. (Sophisticated people are the worst.)"
"There’ll be all kinds of benefits to being in the city. You just wait and see," Aunt Lovey said.
"In spite of their imperfect union, their different interests and language and culture, Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey shared an essential vein and should never have been separated."
"How cruel it must be for a man to live past his soul."
"If you framed it with your fingers, blocked out the lights and the camera and the bald director, the scene looked almost real."
"I love Toronto. The lights were pretty magical."
"Maybe melodrama is too tepid a word to describe a fantasy that involves Ruby and me not dying."
"People don’t finish, people stop. To finish is to say okay, now it’s right, never I’m going to change it. To stop is to say okay, it’s not perfect, but I have to go to something else."
"I have never looked into my sister’s eyes, but I’ve seen inside her soul."
"And though I’ve never climbed a tree, I’ve scaled a mountain, and that’s a hell of a thing."
"I am Rose Darlen of Baldoon County. Beloved sister of Ruby. The world’s oldest surviving craniopagus twins. Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash were right. How lucky Ruby and I have been to be 'The Girls'."