Top 95 Carol Rifka Brunt Quotes
#1. But if they loved each other so much, couldn't they talk it out?"
Toby gave an exasperated laugh. "You get into habits. Ways of being with certain people.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#2. I thought of trying to catch her eye, so she'd know I understood what she'd done, but I decided not to. Everyone needs to think they have secrets.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#3. I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#4. Until the last light faded. Until the space between the tree branches and the branches themselves became the same dark thing.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#6. Please promise to take the very best care of my only girl. With so much love my heart might split in two ...
Carol Rifka Brunt
#7. The bed was warm and ordinary and perfect, and it had been such a long, long day. Probably the longest day of my life. I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds,
Carol Rifka Brunt
#8. I go to the movies whenever I get the chance, because the movie theater is like the woods. It's another place that's like a time machine.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#9. Maybe all I wanted was for Toby to hear the wolves that lived in the dark forest of my heart.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#10. None of those things should have mattered, but I guess they did. I guess they were like water. Soft and harmless until enough time went by. Then all of a sudden you found yourself with the Grand Canyon on your hands.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#11. I ... Why do you want me to?"
There was a flicker of something in Greta's look. I couldn't tell whether it was a flicker of love or regret or meanness, and then she said, "Why wouldn't I want you to?"
Because you hate me, I thought, but I didn't say it.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#12. Every new party, every new bunch of people, and I start thinking that maybe this is my chance.That I'm going to be normal this time. A new leaf. A fresh start. But then I find myself at the party, thinking, Oh, yeah. This again.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#13. Nothing had changed. I was the stupid one again. I was the girl who never understood who she was to people.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#14. I thought how there was a kind of power in being needed. In having a purpose. I could feel it hardening up my bones and thickening my blood.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#15. After a snowstorm is the best time to be in the woods, because all the empty beer and soda cans and candy wrappers disappear, and you don't have to try as hard to be in another time. Plus there's just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#16. 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.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#17. Finn said art isn't about drawing or painting a perfect bowl of fruit. It's about ideas. And you, he said, have enough good ideas to last a lifetime.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#18. There are dark black buttons tattooed on my heart. I'll carry them for the rest of my days.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#19. There was something so electric about it. So dangerous. Those little touches were everything. I lived fro them. You can build a whole world around the tiniest of touches. Did you know that? Can you imagine? - Tobias Aldshaw
Carol Rifka Brunt
#20. Then, who is Matilda?' I asked.
Toby tilted his cup and poked at the slush with his straw. 'I suppose Matilda's the girl who felt like home.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#21. Things you'd never even seen with Finn could remind you of him, because he was the one person you'd want to show. "Look at that," you'd want to say, because you knew he would find a way to think it was wonderful. To make you feel like the most observant person in the world for spotting it.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#22. In the book A Wrinkle in Time, it says that time is like a big old rumpled blanket. What I'd like is to be caught in one of those wrinkles. Tucked away. Hidden in a small tight fold.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#23. I was in a place where nobody knew my heart even a little bit.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#24. I don't like to overhear things, because, in my experience, things your parents are keeping quiet about are things you don't want to know.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#25. I knew the way lost hopes could be dangerous, how they could turn a person into someone they never thought they'd be.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#26. Maybe there's a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#27. In having a purpose. I could feel it hardening up my bones and thickening my blood. I felt older and smarter than anyone else I knew. I could do anything, anything at all.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#28. There was a flicker of something in Greta's look. I couldn't tell whether it was a flicker of love or regret or meanness.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#29. And I suddenly understood that getting drunk was just one more way to leave this place, this time.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#31. Why, June, you sound surprised. He'd put on an offended-housewife voice, but it was in a hoarse whisper, so it sounded like an offended housewife who smoked five packs of cigarettes a day. I laughed.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#32. It felt like all the blood in my body had swum up to my face , leaving the skin around my heart completely transparent.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#34. I know all about love that's too big to stay in a tiny bucket. Splashing out all over the place in the most embarrassing way possible.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#35. I needed to know that my mother understood that her hand was in this too. That all the jealousy and envy and shame we carried was our own kind of sickness. As much a disease as Toby and Finn's AIDS.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#36. That's different, I said. And it was. A portrait is a picture where somebody gets to choose what you look like. How they want to see you. A camera catches whichever you happens to be there when it clicks.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#37. I'm okay with one or two people, but more than that and I turn into a naked mole rat.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#38. I only need one good friend to see me through. Most people aren't like that. Most people are always looking out for more people to know.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#40. Maybe it should be a crime to try to see things about people they don't want you to see. (p. 4)
Carol Rifka Brunt
#42. Either you're a falconer or you're not. Either the birds come back to you or they fly away.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#43. All my parents' music came from greatest hits albums. It was like the thought of getting even one bum track was too much for them to handle.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#44. That's one of those snapshot moments. I don't know why some memories are like that, where everything is perfectly preserved. Frozen.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#45. You don't need sex for that kind of thing to happen. For your body to forget how to tell if it's hungry or not. For you to mistake someone else's hunger for your own.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#46. If things went my way, I would be working at a renaissance fair as a falconer. I wouldn't have to worry about climbing career ladders or getting promotions, because falconry's not like that. Either you're a falconer or you're not. Either the birds come back to you or they fly away. My father waited
Carol Rifka Brunt
#47. I want to imagine wrinkled time, and forests thick with wolves, and bleak midnight moors
Carol Rifka Brunt
#48. Because maybe I don't want to leave the planet invisible. Maybe I need at least one person to remember something about me.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#49. It's hard to do that, to decide to believe one thing over another.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#50. But it's my face. Mine and Greta's. We don't belong to everybody.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#51. She was wired into my heart. Twisted and kinked and threaded right through.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#53. I suppose I'm in that very small group of people who are not waiting for their own story to unfold. If my life was a film, I'd have walked out by now.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#55. ... there's just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on. It makes you believe you're special, even though you know you're not.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#56. Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn't have. Maybe there's a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. Waiting to make me feel the same impossibility over and over again.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#57. It's the most unhappy people who want to stay alive, because they think they haven't done everything they want to do. They think they haven't had enough time. They feel they've been shortchanged.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#58. I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I kept looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#59. I didn't say anything. Greta always knew how to make me lose my words.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#60. But you don't know what it was like. It was just the two of us that afternoon, and then ... and then it was just me.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#62. The walls of the tunnels were covered with so much dirt, it was almost like fur. I thought those tunnels were the kind of places wolves might live. I thought they were like the vessels of the human heart.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#63. Who could resist the two of us all squashed into one beautiful person, right? He smiled.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#64. I felt the wall between the world of secrets and the real world start to collapse. I felt the girls from the portrait becoming us and us becoming them ...
Carol Rifka Brunt
#65. Maybe when you're dead you can crawl inside other people and make them nicer than they were before.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#66. I like the word clandestine. It feels medieval. Sometimes I think of words as being alive. If clandestine were alive, it would be a pale little girl with hair the color of fall leaves and a dress as white as the moon.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#67. Going into the woods alone is the best way to pretend you're in another time. It's a thing you can only do alone. If there's somebody else with you, it's too easy to remember where you really are.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#68. As you head into adulthood, June, you may occasionally encounter oversize exotic beverages of an alcoholic nature. I felt it was my duty to acquaint you with these potentially hazardous drinks.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#69. That's the difference between you and Greta. She has better things to do. She gets involved in clubs, activities. She has friends. But you? You slump around in that room of yours
Carol Rifka Brunt
#70. That's the secret. If you always make sure you're exactly the person you hoped to be, if you always make sure you know only the very best people, then you won't care if you die tomorrow.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#71. There was something so lonely about that moment, everyone around me completely involved in this thing I wasn't a part of, me with nowhere to go.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#72. Opening a present from a live person was scary enough. There was always the chance that the gift might be so wrong, so completely not the kind of thing you liked, that you'd realize they didn't really know you at all.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#73. I thought how that was wrong and terrible and beautiful all at the same time.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#74. If you close your eyes when you sing in Latin, and if you stand right at the back so you can keep one hand against the cold stone wall of the church, you can pretend you're in the Middle Ages. That's why I did it. That's what I was in it for.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#75. I was afraid he wouldn't remember the joke. I always remember jokes, but some people forget right away and then I end up looking like a weirdo for still remembering something so small.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#77. I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds, if you want them to be there.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#78. You think I don't know about wrong love, June? You think I don't understand embarrassing love?
Carol Rifka Brunt
#79. I dream about people who don't need to have sex to know they love each other.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#80. You could try to believe what you wanted, but it never worked. Your brain and your heart decided what you were going to believe and that was that. Whether you liked it or not.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#81. I told my mother he looked like a deflated balloon. Greta said he looked like a small gray moth wrapped in a spider's web. That's because everything about Greta is more beautiful, even the way she says things.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#82. Beauty parlor was a game was used to play when we were little, when we were still best friends.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#83. When you have a watch, time is like a swimming pool. There are edges and sides. Without a watch, time is like the ocean. Sloppy and vast.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#84. My mother gave me a disappointed look. Then I gave her one back. Mine was for everything, not just the sandwich.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#86. The sun kept on with its slipping away, and I thought how many small good things in the world might be resting on the shoulders of something terrible.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#88. Greta always wanted to know everything. Every little detail. But I understood. You can ruin anything if you know too much.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#90. I'm not a violent person. I didn't think I was a violent person, but right then something dangerous seemed to be waking up. Some hard dark sleeping thing from deep in my belly had opened one eye.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#91. Sometimes I wondered if I might go through my whole life looking for someone who came even a little bit close
Carol Rifka Brunt
#92. If you think a story can be like a kind of cement, the sloppy kind that you put between bricks, the kind that looks like cake frosting before it dries hard, then maybe I thought it would be possible to use what Toby had to hold Finn together, to keep him here with me a little bit longer.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#93. I thought it was good to test yourself sometimes. It was good to see how much you could take.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#94. My mother said it was like a cassette tape you could never rewind. But it was hard to remember you couldn't rewind it while you were listening to it. And so you'd forget and fall into the music and listen and then, without you even knowing it, the tape would suddenly end.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#95. when it's only you and your sister, you can do any embarrassing thing you want.
Carol Rifka Brunt
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