Sundial Quotes
"Love and nausea are often indistinguishable to me."
"Living is enough. It is so intense and painful."
"You can't be married for twelve years to a compulsively unfaithful man without developing a fine instinct for the truth."
"Memories lie in the smooth stone floors, shimmer in the heat haze."
"I love this place but I know its power."
"I'm OK. Honestly, sweetie. It must have been something I ate."
"It's important to remember this, whatever else she may be."
"Memory is a noose around the neck. Sometimes it tightens on me so strongly that I can't breathe."
"If there were rules, no one would ever be disappointed in you."
"The past always has its hands around your neck, doesn't it?"
"I want to be bold, but sometimes I wish we could lay it down for a while, like a heavy backpack."
"You have to believe the string is in love. The string wants to be a knot more than anything in the world."
"It’s a terrifying feeling, to be caught between two selves."
"The differences are more important. One child was hit by their father, the other wasn’t. One child was dyslexic, the other wasn’t."
"The point of those conversations is to pretend that everyone has a lot in common. I was different—I ruined the fun."
"We need to leave parts of Callie here, too."
"Every night, all night, we heard the crying dogs—your mom, Falcon, Mia, and me—and we said to ourselves, 'No, it’s not right to treat dogs like that.'"
"Sometimes I think that. Other times I think we’ll dwindle into yellowed poisonous age together—the waiting will eat me slowly until I am nothing but strung-together bone."
"No one else is moved to speak tonight so we sit for a time in contented silence. The stars wheel overhead and the fire hisses and eats the logs."
"You have all given me a home. My first home since I went to jail."
"That reality doesn’t exist—me without my sister."
"We don’t live in a perfect world, Rob. You know where the dogs come from."
"I have tried to give you an education. I am sorry you feel that’s not enough."
"You could have done this another way, Jack."
"I always wake at dawn in the desert. For a second I don’t know where I am."
"We don’t like to see blood. You know, horses can smell a battle on the ground years after?"
"You think you’re better than them but you’re not. You’re worse because you know what lying about that stuff means for us. For me."
"You used to say you’d always protect me."
"It’s good you didn’t dig it up. I shouldn’t have done that."
"Everyone else seems to have a secret shortcut to getting on with one another."
"I’m not a complete idiot. I can tell that there’s something practiced about it."
"I mistake intensity for passion, like many people, I suppose."
"You don’t know who you are, Rob. You don’t know any better, I guess."
"You were probably looking forward to that. But I took too long."
"You couldn’t even wait for me to find out by digging up those stupid pages you wrote."
"You’re a bully and a liar. Stop threatening me."
"Don’t use me as an excuse because you’re afraid to go."
"I know what I want now, Rob. I want to keep it."
"We’re each other’s heart, outside our bodies."
"I’d like you to meet my fiancé, Irving Fitzgerald Cussen the third."
"You’re the one who left, not me. And you need help."
"I’m going to tell the headmistress. It’s too late, you can’t stop me."
"Did you not suspect that I am in fact your mother the witch?"
"Your sister’s gone away for a while, actually. Visiting relatives out east in Nebraska."
"We don’t know. We think maybe the click doesn’t stop cutting."
"I think she’s remembering what happened to it. Who did it to her."
"Dogs will do that in the wild, sometimes, when a member of the pack gets old and begins to hold the others back."
"We feed the dogs without opening the gates now, throwing chunks over the chain-link."
"I screw the suppressor onto the .22. That should take care of the noise."
"Let me go," I say, but it comes out weak.
"We think you were four when you were found."
"You didn’t speak but I saw what was in your eyes."
"It was exactly a year, two months, and a day before you could take a walk in the daylight."
"The police assumed that those two killed one another, but I knew better."
"You did what you had to do, to get free."