90 Quotes by Carol Rifka Brunt

Heart. Hard Heart,′ I said, not sure where it came from. ‘The hardest heart in the world.’... ‘The question is, stone or ice? Crack or melt?

I sat on a bench and my mother stood in front of me, looking down the track. Her hair was cut short, and because it had all turned gray when she was twenty-three, she always had it dyed a deep chestnut brown. It was that color all over except for a super thin stripe at the top of her head, where the gray showed through. Sometimes I wanted to touch that place on my mother’s head, that thin crack where her real self had forced its way through.

I didn’t know how to seal a promise with a dead person.

You could just hold them, couldn’t you? You could sit close to them, nestle into them so you could hear the machine of them churning away. You could press your ear against that person’s back, listening to the rhythm of them, knowing that you were both made of the same exact stuff. You could do things like that.

But being a monk is just one more impossible thing, like traveling to the past or having Finn here forever, because to be a monk you’d have to be a man and you’d also have to believe in God, neither of which was ever going to happen. I don’t think God would create a disease just to kill people like Finn, and if he did, then there’s no way I’d ever even consider worshipping him.

It’s hard to do that, to decide to believe one thing over another.

Being a romantic means you always see what’s beautiful. What’s good. You don’t want to see the gritty truth of things. You believe everything will turn out right.

Greta always wanted to know everything. Every little detail. But I understood. You can ruin anything if you know too much.

Then, into the silence, over the top of everything, came a long, sad howl. For a second it felt like the sound had come from inside me. Like the world had taken everything I was feeling and turned it into a sound.