53 Quotes by Jenna Blum

The Mississippi flows slowly by and the sun shines clean over everything, and Karena knows Tiff thinks she is crying because of Charles, because her brother is stuck in a mental asylum instead of out and about on this beautiful day the way he should be, healthy and alert and comfortable in his own skin.

The amount of all the pretending she’ll have to do exhausts her.

Each person has this choice to make about how to live with the past, this dignity, this inviolable right.

Thomas cracks his joints on the steering wheel. It’s all right. I mean, it’s not, but of course you wouldn’t know. It’s not exactly something I advertise. And I only bring it up now to let you know I’m in your corner. Life is so often unfair and painful and love is hard to find and you have to take it whenever and wherever you can get it, no matter how brief it is or how it ends. So I understand. That’s all.

Information trumps fear, right?

Just that ever since I was very little I’d had this – affliction, or gift, or whatever you want to call it; that I have visions. And that this is something I accept about myself as part of who I am, a scary part sometimes, but also the best part of me because it makes me who I am, you know? It helps me understand things.

For one of the odd things about death, Trudy has discovered, is that in its wake one must go about business as usual; it seems heartless and wrong, but now that the rituals of mourning have been attended to, the sole task left to Trudy is to try and comprehend the enormity of thes sudden change.

Most of us are drawn to this time period thinking it was a war of absolute good versus absolute evil – qualities rarely found in their purest form – and that’s true. But don’t forget that history isn’t just a study in black and white. Human behavior is comprised of ulterior motives, of gray shades.

Anna imagines that, were she able to visit the caves in which people first dwelled, she would find scrawled drawings that have been omitted from museums and history books. There would be scenes of ritual aggression and submission, painted in blood, caked with dried seminal fluid. They are the very antithesis of fresh, the rites between men and women; age-old and rotten to the core.