21 Quotes by Julia Drake

He was a jellyfish being asked to float on land. Maybe life, for him, would always be hard.

Him, her, a whale, you, what does it matter? You both saw the wreck, and you both swam up.

Here’s what I should’ve said: I saw your face and the world was different.

The warm invitation was just like my dad, too. He’d move a stack of papers from his extra chair and run lines with me while his computer pinged and his phone buzzed. He probably lost hours of sleep as a result. Just another kindness I’d taken for granted.

The puzzle’s an incomplete circus, the pieces touching each other in all these ways, and there’s a hitch in our back from where you’ve hunched, but you’ve done it. You’ve put this thing together. Seams like veins pump blood through this cobbled-together catastrophe, this broken, beautiful mess.

By comparison, the Titanic sank in two hours, forty minutes. Pretty impressive, to have sunk to the bottom even faster than the twentieth century’s greatest shipwreck. Especially considering I was only sixteen. I didn’t even have a driver’s license, but I was an expert in the art of catastrophe.

I leave behind a wake of splintered wood and broken buildings and scared, know-nothing boys.

Survival was its own quest: we needed to choose to survive over and over again. We had to wash up on shore, and we had to choose to keep washing up every single day. We had to let the survival accrue, pebble after pebble, building a beach from a million tiny moments until suddenly we stopped, looked around, and thought, on a Saturday in Maine, I’m glad we’re here.

This was a new station with music so lovely, so frightening, so foreign, I hadn’t even known to search for its signal.