Zan Romanoff > Quotes

“If you're telling the story, it means you're still alive. If you're telling the story, it means you're still haunted by it too.”
― Zan Romanoff, Look

“You could be nothing,'' Lulu says.
''I could be anything,'' Cass corrects.”
― Zan Romanoff, Look

“It's like someone's opened a door just a crack—not enough to walk through, but enough to spill light into a very dark room.”
― Zan Romanoff, Look

“no-homo-even-though-we’re-both-kind-of-homos”
― Zan Romanoff, Look

“The point of fandom was that it was the one place she wasn't afraid to be anything.”
― Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever

“Plus, it's not like she would admit to what happened last night even if her mom was here. They just don't talk about stuff like this, really: boys, bands, feelings.”
― Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever

“favorite joke is to short-circuit their Passover seders. A seder is supposed to be a long ritual dinner, hours and hours devoted to telling a story everyone already knows. His parents, observant immigrants, used to make him sit through all of it. Lulu’s whole life, he’s sat everyone down at the table and said, “You know how this one goes, right? They tried to kill us; they couldn’t; let’s eat!” and tucked right into his matzoh ball soup.”
― Zan Romanoff, Look

“The ease of the lie almost erases the fact that now, officially, she is lying all the time,on purpose, to everyone.”
― Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever

“Survival is a privilege,'' Noami says. ''And it is also kind of a burden.”
― Zan Romanoff, Look

“She loves the idea that love can be kept like a secret, that it can grow up through the cracks between things and take you by surprise. That it can be tender and powerful, forbidden and flourishing.”
― Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever

“People have this idea of what fangirls look like, and she's not it. She can get away with so much pretending.”
― Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever

“other than the girls, he’s the person most likely to be able to identify her, and if Jes really is in trouble, they won’t want her around to cause any more of it.”
― Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever

“Jes always seemed too obvious. Even girls who didn't care about Fever Dream knew he was the most beautiful one.”
― Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever

“Looking at him, she understands instinctively that beauty and danger are twin edges of the same knife.”
― Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever

“dick-measuring tension”
― Zan Romanoff, Look

“Sometimes fandom functions like an echo chamber.”
― Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever

“You don't have to rebel to grow up," her mother says. "I always thought you understood that.”
― Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever

“That's when she started lying to her friends about how she was spending her time; that was when fandom went from an occasional hobby to a necessary escape hatch.”
― Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever

“And even if she could sheen and buff and polish her surface, the interior would still be what it's always been: she would still be her wild, messy, impossible self underneath.”
― Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever

“That's when she started lying to her friends about how she spending her time; that was when fandom went from an occasional hobby to a necessary escape hatch.”
― Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever

“Grace thinks of Persephone and the pomegranate seeds. She took something for herself when Jes offered her that first cigarette, and again with her photographs at Holy Communion. And look at her: she's ended up staying so much longer than she ever thought she'd be allowed to.”
― Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever

“But Land and Solly-the two of them, together-they were her religion. She performed her acts of worship and accorded them all of her faith. Their love was the first mystery, the one that bound the world together”
― Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever

“Only she and Jes actually know what happened on that street last night. After so many years of keeping secrets about him, she has one with him. She isn't ready to let go of that yet. The keeping is too delicious, still.”
― Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever

“Lulu isn’t sure which of them leans in first, or faster. All she knows is that one minute she’s not kissing Cass. And then, she is.”
― Zan Romanoff, Look

“Whoever she ends up with will walk into her life midway through, and she'll have to figure out how to make room for him in the middle of all her clutter and mess. She'll have to figure out how much of herself she can show him without scaring him off.”
― Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever