Anne Spollen > Quotes

“When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, like flute notes rising up, like the words of glass speaking. Then there comes a point when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light.”
― Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water

“I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent was much more subtle than the ocean's heavy, fishy aroma; it was a whiff of salt and mint, just as I approached the water on a dive, that warned me that a more powerful scent would soon enter my nose. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.”
― Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water

“I heard silence, silence infinite as the bottom of the ocean, a silence that sealed.”
― Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water

“I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same.”
― Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water

“I looked around at the rooms that I did not see as rooms but more as a landscape for my emotions, a biography of memory.”
― Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water

“I stood there feeling the lightness of my bones, knowing now this was not only lack of sleep that had transformed my bones into feathers, but my body's recognition that soon I would be leaving this place I had inhabited for one year, this place made entirely of grief.”
― Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water

“You knew then that this was not any kind of hospital that cured, but a hospital that held, that kept their patients away from the rest of the world, a kind of ark that floated along full of life, but not participating in life.... These people no longer made progress.”
― Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water

“Ma, Kyle has the personality of a light switch. I don't have a crush on him. -Now, what exactly is that sentence supposed to mean? - I mean, he has two moods, and the presence of something that was created to go unnoticed throughout life. Like a light switch: on, off, there when you need it, forgettable when you don't.”
― Anne Spollen, Light Beneath Ferns

“The room had the impersonal, disconnected feel of a waiting room on Jupiter.”
― Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water

“Lorsque s'installe le silence suffisamment longtemps, on découvre qu'il se déplace. Il nous glisse dessus sans forme particulière, mais exerce un certain poids, exactement comme l'eau.”
― Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water