30 Quotes by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

My sisters and I stand on the deck, the shale tile cool against the soles of our feet - for a week it seems we never have to wear shoes - and take turns twirling, the matching turquoise silk skirts my mother bought us sliding coolly up our legs, our laughter flying out over the ocean. We are all light and happy and far, far away from home.

Years later, I remember the waxy taste of the yellow paint, the papery taste of splintered wood, the sharp metallic of the graphite.

I remember a new heaviness in my body, but maybe that's the work of time and my looking back.

The sight of a palm tree silhouetted against the sky made even his life feel like a movie

I carry the memory somewhere inside my body I can't control, can't even access to reach inside and edit the memory out. I still want to edit it out. I still want to be free of it. But I know I'm bound in ways I'll never see, never understand. We carry what makes us.

In the books I find the thrum of everything unsayable. The characters weep the way I want to, love the way I want to, cry, die, beat their breasts, and bray with life.

dragonflies circled me, the sun knifing off the brilliant blues and yellows of their bodies.

This is the logic I will never find an answer to, the way in my family a hurt will always be your hurt or my hurt, one to be set against the other and weighed, never the family’s hurt.

It will be years before I understand the value of softness.