9 Quotes by Vendela Vida

...and on some nights in bed, in that moment before sleep erased the day, I would picture the way the sky in Lapland looked the morning I left, how the train had sped south beneath a sky that was brighter than it had been in weeks. It had pulsed with reds and oranges, as though hiding a beating heart.

This is the way of air travel: fellow passengers applaud because they didn't die, and then they cut in front of you so they can exit four seconds earlier.

You panic and you rage, then this calm settles over you, and you remake yourself.

Lazlo's mom, Ágota, and my dad had a falling out over the kinds of things siblings usually have falling outs over: money and love. My father made money and Aunt Ágota lost money. Then there was disagreement about how their mother, my grandmother, should live. My father thought a retirement home. Ágota wanted to be paid to take care f her. The argument didn't help anyone. In the end, my grandmother died anyway.

Sometimes we catch them in jars for a minute before releasing them. Sometimes we wait too long to release them and find them dead. We know the names of the girls who keep the butterflies too long, and we have no idea what to do with this information.

People pretend things didn’t happen. Or so what, they happened, it’s okay. Well, it’s never okay. It’s always ruined.

There is this sense of time when you’re traveling, that the time is not how you know it, but how a country knows it.

This is the way of air travel: fellow passengers applaud because they didn’t die, and then they cut in front of you so they can exit four seconds earlier.

Recently, everything around me felt familiar yet amiss, like the first time you ride in the back seat of your own car.