Ilsa J. Bick Quotes & Sayings

I don't know what I expected.
No, I'm lying. I know what I wanted. — Ilsa J. Bick

You know, Bob, school is school, one of those life experiences we kids all have to get through in order to become you. Then we wonder what all the fuss was about, especially while we're cleaning up your little messes: toxic waste, war, bank bailouts. Honestly, if we ran up debt the way you guys do? You'd ground us, take away our cells, and make us clean toilets with a toothbrush until we'd pay back every penny. — Ilsa J. Bick

What you couldn't see and only imagined was always scarier than what was real. — Ilsa J. Bick

Run, she told herself. Run, you idiot, run.
But she didn't. She couldn't. She just ... couldn't. — Ilsa J. Bick

We were like matching bookends, almost touching but with volumes between us and stories, so many stories. — Ilsa J. Bick

Everybody breaks sooner or later, Bob. Anyone can drown. Sometimes you see it. Most often, you
don't because the body protects and the skin hides, so drowning doesn't look like drowning and some
people scar so nicely. Take it from an expert. — Ilsa J. Bick

No one can help but stare at the monster, because horror is a cousin to awe. — Ilsa J. Bick

It was that stages-of-anger thing. I was shocked and then I got pissed and then I fought like hell ... and then I went numb. They called it acceptance, but it wasn't. It's what happens when you have only two choices: live with the monster, or kill yourself. — Ilsa J. Bick

How people react is going to be based on how you react. — Ilsa J. Bick

I am a ghost in a land of phantoms and forgotten nightmares. — Ilsa J. Bick

What's the point of not taking chances? I don't know if I could stand living my whole life afraid. — Ilsa J. Bick

She'd drawn the moment of her death.
No. NO. She'd DRAWN herself to death. — Ilsa J. Bick

But sticking to rules just because they're there does not make them right. You need to learn when the rules should be broken. — Ilsa J. Bick

Don't get so caught up in looking behind you forget to look ahead. — Ilsa J. Bick

She's got the kind of ethereal, unselfconscious beauty some young girls possess that breaks your heart. Or theirs. — Ilsa J. Bick

It was, come to think of it, a little like a kinder, gentler Psycho-Dad making one of his command decisions. Exactly the same, only without all the fuss and blood. — Ilsa J. Bick

As a doc, though, I've seen what happens when people are under a lot of stress. Doesn't always bring out their best. When people are scared, they get angry. They'll do things they never thought they would. They'll bargain and compromise in order to survive; they'll chase after miracle cures and believe just about anything so long as it gives them hope. When hope fails, then watch out. Some people get brutal. They'll turn on each other; they'll become their own worst enemies. — Ilsa J. Bick

Dewerman was this bearded 1960's throwback: a Teletubby in tie-dye, suspenders, and thinning hair scraped back into a stringy gray rat. — Ilsa J. Bick

What about study hall? Shouldn't I go to the library?
"What for, Ms. Lord?" Mr. anderson said. "You're with me — Ilsa J. Bick

So I think I'll stay here a little while longer. There's plenty of time to get off this gurney and open that door and rejoin the rest of you.
There's all the time I have left on Earth.
There's the rest of my life. — Ilsa J. Bick

I think. I sense. I wonder. — Ilsa J. Bick

You want to brawl. You want to fight. Fighting tricks you into believing you can change the past, even when the past is dead and gone and all of it ashes. — Ilsa J. Bick

Desire is so much sweeter when you cant have it. — Ilsa J. Bick

The familiar was usually invisible; how many people really noticed everything they saw? — Ilsa J. Bick

You really didn't appreciate how thick, how powerful water was until you had to fight it. — Ilsa J. Bick

This Army of Light was mine. I had summoned it. I had DRAWN it.
Could I have stopped it? I don't know.
The truth is, I didn't want to. — Ilsa J. Bick

Those brain-zapped kids weren't the only - or maybe even the worst - enemy. — Ilsa J. Bick

Honestly, Bob: how do you carve a scream? — Ilsa J. Bick

Thinking about all that was exhausting. Despite the hours I'd spent getting shrink-wrapped, I still wasn't sold that talking did a whole heck of a lot except let everyone else know what was going on inside your head. It's not like talking ever made anything go away. — Ilsa J. Bick

My English teacher said that a writer is the worst judge of his own work. — Ilsa J. Bick

I am a ghost in a land of phantoms and remembered nightmares. — Ilsa J. Bick

So I need the story, Jenna. I need the truth.
Right, like the two are the same thing. — Ilsa J. Bick

I didn't throw the paper away.
Maybe I should have.
Oh, the things you know in retrospect. — Ilsa J. Bick

Neither was evil. They were both true to who they are. — Ilsa J. Bick

As the dog sprinted back, Jack said to the girl, "Sweetheart,honey, why do you have to be so hateful?"
"Why not?" Ellie said. "It's not like being good ever got me anywhere. — Ilsa J. Bick

Tell yourself you're dead, the way Matt does, so the past can't hurt you. — Ilsa J. Bick

Sometimes you don't know what you need until it's gone — Ilsa J. Bick

Raccoon." She saw Ellie put a hand to her mouth to cover the giggles and then looked back at Tom. "Like, you caught it?"
"Well, it sure didn't get Fed-Exed [ ... ] — Ilsa J. Bick

There are those individuals who die for a cause, and we say they have made the ultimate sacrifice. We call them martyrs, and we never doubt their sincerity.
Yet many others search their entire lives for something - or someone - worth dying for and this is very different. These are the lonely and the desperate, fearful that their lives have no meaning. They yearn for the bullet, if only someone else will pull the trigger. — Ilsa J. Bick

Not everyone wears their scars on their skin. — Ilsa J. Bick

This is a fairy tale with teeth and claws. — Ilsa J. Bick

They call it the drowning instinct. It's when drowning doesn't look like drowning. (pg. 241) — Ilsa J. Bick

Follow your heart. Just don't get lost. — Ilsa J. Bick

Monster or not, he was risking his neck to save her. — Ilsa J. Bick

She said all writers were prima donnas, drunks, social misfits, pompous, or depressed. Brilliant, maybe, but completely crazy. — Ilsa J. Bick

The things you think about when you're a hair's breath away from getting yourself killed. — Ilsa J. Bick

We all have our fictions, little lies we tell ourselves to keep going from one day to the next. — Ilsa J. Bick

Obeying orders just to obey is the mark of a person who has ceased to think. Remember, it is better to suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong. — Ilsa J. Bick

The grief in her green eyes slips then hardens and, for an instant, Pendleton sees the woman she has become and has no right being, not at sixteen. — Ilsa J. Bick

Would it interest you, at all, to know that he did try to scramble back onto the ice? That his hands grabbed and his fingers clawed, but the ice - that treacherous, greedy, teasing ice - kept breaking and breaking and breaking, sketching a path straight for me? And that when he saw what would happen to me, he stopped trying to save himself?
Would you believe that someone could love anyone that much? — Ilsa J. Bick

Why can't you like me?" he said, his voice breaking. His scent steamed then, hot and heady with a welter of contradictions: apples and fire and electric roil of those cold, black shadows. "Why can't you like me just a little?"
She would never know how she might have answered, because he never gave her the chance.
Instead, he kissed her. — Ilsa J. Bick

I gargled a laugh, but I'd never felt more like crying in my life. I'm fine. — Ilsa J. Bick

I doubted I would need my eyes. I drew in the dark, after all. — Ilsa J. Bick