43 Quotes by Emily M. Danforth

There were angry clouds building up behind the moutains, black-gray clouds, great clumps of them colored just like cotton balls after Aunt Ruth cleaned off her eye makeup from a big night out, all gunky with mascara and eye shadow. (p 378)

Lindsey wasn't sitting there with the two of them. And Lindsey wasn't exiled to Promise for at least a year. So I kept the Lindsey part of me quiet.

Alex saw very clearly how dangerous a book like Mary’s could become in the hands of such impressionable girls, such privileged girls: girls who kissed and fondled and laughed as they read each other passages out in the woods; girls whose parents' social standing had taught them that there was nothing at all in the world they could not subjugate, purchase, or ignore; girls who set fires only to watch as others tried, and failed, to put them out.

Now there was photographic evidence of me with a girl. Lindsey pack the camera in her duffel while I contemplated the film inside it, how it was pregnant with our secret, its birth inevitable.

I was doing my little stand up shtick, the one I did for pretty girls, so they'd like me quickly and wouldn't try too hard to actually get to know me beyond my role as wisecracking Cameron, the orphan. Maybe it was a little like flirting, but also a kind of protection: Don't get too close; I'm just jokes with substance.

...when I closed my eyes and saw her drinking tea and opened them and still could see her, and I wanted so much to see more.

Now I sometimes wonder how things might have turned out differently if I'd not made that decision, but you don't really get anywhere when you think too much about stuff like that.

I just liked girls because I couldn’t help not to.

Maybe I still haven’t become me. I don’t know how you tell for sure when you finally have.