Carol Rifka Brunt Quotes & Sayings

Greta always wanted to know everything. Every little detail. But I understood. You can ruin anything if you know too much. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

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

The kinds of things I want don't cost money. — Carol Rifka Brunt

My mother gave me a disappointed look. Then I gave her one back. Mine was for everything, not just the sandwich. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

The day my mother gave us the keys, she also made me and Greta sign a form so that the bank knew our signatures. To get in we had to show our key and sign something so they would know it was really us. I was worried that my signature wouldn't look the same. I wasn't sure when that thing would happen that made it so you always signed your name exactly the same, but it hadn't happened to me yet. So far I'd only had to sign something three times. Once for a code of conduct for the eighth grade field trip to Philadelphia, once for a pact I made with Beans and Frances Wykoski in fifth grade that we'd never have boyfriends until high school. (Of the three of us, I'm the only one who kept that pact.) — Carol Rifka Brunt

Until the last light faded. Until the space between the tree branches and the branches themselves became the same dark thing. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Maybe all I wanted was for Toby to hear the wolves that lived in the dark forest of my heart. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

Who could resist the two of us all squashed into one beautiful person, right? He smiled. — Carol Rifka Brunt

I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn't like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size. You were a boy, and already it was certain you wouldn't be a mother and it was likely you wouldn't become a manicurist or a kindergarten teacher. Then you started to grow up and everything you did closed the tunnel in some more. You broke your arm climbing a tree and you ruled out being a baseball pitcher. You failed every math test you ever took and you canceled any hope of being a scientist. Like that. On and on through the years until you were stuck. You'd become a baker or a librarian or a bartender. Or an accountant. And there you were. I figured that on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you'd have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

when it's only you and your sister, you can do any embarrassing thing you want. — Carol Rifka Brunt

I stared at Greta's back. At her matted hair, decorated with brown torn leaves and dirt. What was happening to my sister? What if I'd never come? How long would she have stayed hidden in those cool, damp leaves? How long before she woke up alone and scared, with nothing but the howling of wolves to keep her company? — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

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

Maybe it's just that people didn't know everything then. There were things people had never seen before. Places nobody had ever been. You could make up a story and people would believe it. You could believe in dragons and saints. You could look around at plants and think that maybe they could save your life. — Carol Rifka Brunt

... 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

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

I thought how that was wrong and terrible and beautiful all at the same time. — Carol Rifka Brunt

I sat on a bench and my mother stood in front of me, looking down the track. Her hair was cut short, and because it had all turned gray when she was twenty-three, she always had it dyed a deep chestnut brown. It was that color all over except for a super thin stripe at the top of her head, where the gray showed through. Sometimes I wanted to touch that place on my mother's head, that thin crack where her real self had forced its way through. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

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

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

There was at least some small beauty in what we'd done. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

I dream about people who don't need to have sex to know they love each other. — Carol Rifka Brunt

When I go to the woods now, I always head out along the brook and go straight to the big maple. I run there, like Toby must have done on that stormy night, then I bend down and crawl on the earth. Because what if there's a clue? What if there's a piece of chunky strawberry bubble gum still bundled up in its waxy wrapper, or a weather-faded matchbook, or a fallen button from somebody's big gray coat? What if buried under all those leaves is me? Not this me, but the girl in a Gunne Sax dress with the back zipper open. The girl with the best boots in the world. What if she's under there? What if she's crying? Because she will be, if I find her. Her tears tell the story of what she knows. That the past, present, and future are just one thing. That there's nowhere to go from here. Home is home is home. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

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

People didn't know everything then. There were things people had never seen before. Places nobody had ever been. You could make up a story and people would believe it ... also maybe it seems like it would be okay not to be perfect. Nobody was perfect back then. Just about everyone was defective, and most people had no choice except to stay that way. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

They segued into a more general piece about AIDS. As usual, they started out with footage of some kind of sweaty nightclub in the city with a bunch of gay men dancing around in stupid leather outfits. I couldn't even begin to imagine Finn dancing the night away like some kind of half-dressed cowboy. It would have been nice if for once they show some guys sitting in their living rooms drinking tea and talking about art or movies or something. If they showed that, then maybe people would say, Oh, okay, that's not so strange. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Either you're a falconer or you're not. Either the birds come back to you or they fly away. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

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

I mean, why did sex have to be so important? Why couldn't people live together, spend their whole lives together, just because they liked each other's company? Just because they liked each other more than they liked anyone else in the whole world?
If you found a person like that you wouldn't have to have sex. You could just hold them, couldn't you? — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

Once you know a thing you can't ever unknow it. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

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

Maybe there's a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

You will. I promise. There's a lockup. Each apartment has one. Like a big storage cage. Come with me."
An image of me being locked in a cage in some kind of creepy cellar came into my head. I didn't even know Toby. Not really. And he said himself he was jealous of me. Maybe he would lock me in this basement and nobody in the world would ever guess where I was.
Toby's shoulders drooped, and he cocked his head to one side and said, "Please," in the most pathetic voice ever. Then he perked back up. "Look, truly, June. You won't be sorry."
I thought about it for a few seconds and came to the conclusion that a real psycho wouldn't have mentioned the cage. A real psycho would have lured me down there by telling me there was a puppy or something. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

I was in a place where nobody knew my heart even a little bit. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

Places we went back to so many times that they started to — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

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

And I suddenly understood that getting drunk was just one more way to leave this place, this time. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

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

Beauty parlor was a game was used to play when we were little, when we were still best friends. — Carol Rifka Brunt

I didn't know how to seal a promise with a dead person. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

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

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

But maybe I am. Maybe that's exactly what I am. Maybe all I wanted was for Toby to hear the wolves that lived in the dark forest of my heart. And maybe that's what it meant. Tell the Wolves I'm Home. Maybe Finn understood everything, as usual. You may as well tell them where you live, because they'll find you anyway. They always do. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

What if you ended up in the wrong kind of love? What if you accidentally ended up in the falling kind with someone it would be so gross to fall in love with that you could never tell anyone in the world about it? The kind you'd have to crush down so deep inside yourself that it almost turned your heart into a black hole? The kind you squashed deeper and deeper down, but no matter how much you hoped it would suffocate, it never did? Instead, it seemed to inflate, to grow gigantic as time went by, filling every little spare space you had until it was you. You were it. Until everything you ever saw or thought led you back to one person. The person you weren't supposed to love that way. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

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

Black holes aren't an Earth Science topic, but Mr. Zerbiak is like that. One minute Adam Bell was asking a question about a meteoroid he found in his backyard, and the next Mr. Zerbiak was saying that he was "going a little off topic here, but ... " and of course everyone was suddnely all interested. If teachers pretended that everything they said was "off topic", we'd have a whole school full of straight-A students. — Carol Rifka Brunt

I want to imagine wrinkled time, and forests thick with wolves, and bleak midnight moors — Carol Rifka Brunt

Watching people is a good hobby, but you have to be careful about it. You can't let people catch you staring at them. If people catch you, they treat you like a first-class criminal. And maybe they're right to do that. Maybe it should be a crime to try to see things about people they don't want you to see. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Hm-hm-hm, his laugh went. Like he'd swallowed the sun. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Don't you see? It's like we've known each other all these years. Without even seeing each other. It's like there's been this ... this ghost relationship between us. You laying out my plectrums on the floor, me buying black-and-white cookies every time I knew you would be coming over. You didn't know that was me, but it was. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Sometimes I wondered if I might go through my whole life looking for someone who came even a little bit close — Carol Rifka Brunt

I thought of all the different kinds of love in the world. I could think of ten without even trying. The way parents love their kids, the way you love a puppy or chocolate ice cream or home or your favorite book or your sister. Or your uncle. There's those kinds of love and then there's the other kind. The falling kind. — Carol Rifka Brunt

The real question for me is why Lieutenant Cable and Nellie didn't just get together. Because they would have been a perfect match. I guess the idea is that opposites attract, but I don't think that's what it's like in real life. I think in real life you'd want someone who was as close to you as possible. Someone who could understand exactly the way you thought. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

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

It was a nice thing for her to say. In her way. With Greta you have to look out for the nice things buried in the rest of her mean stuff. Greta's talk is like a geode. Ugly as anything on the outside and for the most part the same on the inside, but every once in a while there's something that shines through. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Yeah, okay. I'll drop it, I said, and although I held it back with every muscle in my body, what I really wanted to do was cry. Not only because Finn had never told me about this guy, but because there was no way to ask him about it. And until then I don't think I really understood the meaning of gone. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

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

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

I'm okay with one or two people, but more than that and I turn into a naked mole rat. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

Greta knows that for me there are no good parties. I'm okay with one or two people, but more than that and I turn into a naked mole rat. That's what being shy feels like. Like my skin is too thin, the light too bright. Like the best place I could possibly be is in a tunnel far under the cool, dark earth. Someone asks me a question and I stare at them, empty-faced, my brain jammed up with how hard I'm trying to find something interesting to say. And in the end, all I can do is nod or shrug, because the light of their eyes looking at me, waiting for me, is just too much to take. And then it's over and there's one more person in the world who thinks I'm a complete and total waste of space. — Carol Rifka Brunt

But being a monk is just one more impossible thing, like traveling to the past or having Finn here forever, because to be a monk you'd have to be a man and you'd also have to believe in God, neither of which was ever going to happen. I don't think God would create a disease just to kill people like Finn, and if he did, then there's no way I'd ever even consider worshipping him. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

It's hard to do that, to decide to believe one thing over another. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

You could just hold them, couldn't you? You could sit close to them, nestle into them so you could hear the machine of them churning away. You could press your ear against that person's back, listening to the rhythm of them, knowing that you were both made of the same exact stuff. You could do things like that. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

You can build a whole world around the tiniest of touches. — Carol Rifka Brunt

I wasn't interested in drinking beer or vodka or smoking cigarettes or doing all the other things Greta thinks I can't even imagine. I don't want to imagine those things. Anyone can imagine things like that. I want to imagine wrinkled time, and forests thick with wolves, and bleak midnight moors. I dream about people who don't need to have sex to know they love each other. I dream about people who would only ever kiss you on the cheek. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

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

I didn't say anything. Greta always knew how to make me lose my words. — Carol Rifka Brunt

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

Maybe when you're dead you can crawl inside other people and make them nicer than they were before. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Nothing had changed. I was the stupid one again. I was the girl who never understood who she was to people. — Carol Rifka Brunt

When people mentioned it to me, they thought they were talking about some casual relative of mine. For most people that's what an uncle was. They had no idea how I felt about Finn. No idea that hearing them talk about AIDS, like that was the important part of the story
more important than who Finn was, or how much I loved him, or how much he was still breaking my heart every single hour of every single day
made me want to scream. — Carol Rifka Brunt

I thought it was good to test yourself sometimes. It was good to see how much you could take. — Carol Rifka Brunt

What's the one superpower of June Elbus?"
I thought about myself from head to toe. It was like being forced to read the most boring part of the Sears catalog. Like leafing through the bathroom accessories pages. Boring brain. Boring face. No sex appeal. Clumsy hands.
"Heart. Hard heart," I said, not sure where it came from. "The hardest heart in the world."
"Hmmm," Toby said, tapping a finger in the air. "That's a useful one, you know. Very handy. The question is ... " Toby paused like he was considering this all very seriously.
"What's the question?"
"The question is, stone or ice? Crack or melt? — Carol Rifka Brunt

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