Sarah Gailey > Quotes

“She was faster than a secret spreading through a church picnic.”
― Sarah Gailey, Worth Her Weight in Gold

“The way I see it, you mostly stop loving a person the same way you stop respecting them. It can happen all at once if something enormous and terrible falls over the two of you. But for the most part, it happens in inches. In a thousand tiny moments of contempt that unravel the image you had of the person you thought you knew.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“This time was going to be different. This time was going to be better. This time, I was going to be enough.”
― Sarah Gailey, Magic for Liars

“He was relieved to have told me. He transmuted his guilt into my anger and now I was the one who had to carry it and he had the audacity to be relieved.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“People didn't stick because I was made of fucking Teflon. I'd always told myself that it was better that way, that being alone was easier. That I wasn't a coward for easing my way out of friendships before they could really start.”
― Sarah Gailey, Magic for Liars

“When there's people around that we don't trust, we let them think we're the kinds of people who are allowed to exist. And the only kind of Librarian that's allowed to exist is one who answers to she.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“Why would you ever cut the blooms off the rosebush?
It was one of the only truly useful things she ever taught me: Stress stimulates growth. Sometimes, in order to make something develop in the right direction, you have to hurt it.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“Sometimes it feels like I’m in a staring contest with failure, and if I blink, I’ll die.”
― Sarah Gailey, Magic for Liars

“Sometimes I don’t know what to say, and it never feels like it’s okay to not know.”
― Sarah Gailey, When We Were Magic

“No one would look at the seams that held me together and guess that they were scars.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“In my mind, I took what had just happened to my shoulder, and I put it into a box. A box with a tight lid. I dropped the box into a deep brick-lined oubliette. It landed somewhere next to my mother's last words and my searing loneliness and everything else I needed to forget, and just like that, I was fine again.”
― Sarah Gailey, Magic for Liars

“I tried not to feel temporary. Just for a few seconds.”
― Sarah Gailey, Magic for Liars

“Affirmation and illusion, bound up tighter than two snakes in the same egg.”
― Sarah Gailey, Magic for Liars

“She wanted that satisfaction. She wanted it for herself wanted it like a half-starved alley-rat watching that table through a window on a bellyaching night. She didn't know how to get it—but she had a feeling that if she stuck with the Librarians for long enough, she might be able to figure it out. How to feast instead of starving.

How to like the person who she was instead of fighting it.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“Even after everything--even with everything that was still between us, that would probably always be between us--she was my sister. I was born reaching for her.”
― Sarah Gailey, Magic for Liars

“Is one possible without the other? I think you have to know someone in order to truly love them, and you have to love someone in order to really hate them.”
― Sarah Gailey, Just Like Home

“There’s no winning. Either I’m a bitch who needs to control everything, or I’m an easy mark.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“He tried to build us strong and steady and whole. But he didn’t keep us safe. He didn’t know how to shelter us from all the hurt that was waiting, because he thought that hurt was the shape of love.”
― Sarah Gailey, Just Like Home

“The thing about me is, I let things go. I let people go. I don’t know how to hang on to them—I try, but I hold too tight or not tight enough or something in between and they go. They always go.”
― Sarah Gailey, Magic for Liars

“When someone thinks they are getting away with something, they're easier to manipulate. They stop looking closely at the things that might make it feel like their lie is unraveling, and they reveal things they didn't mean to.”
― Sarah Gailey, Magic for Liars

“Keep fighting. It will be hard, and it will be awful, and it will be worth it. Don’t give up, even when it feels like dying. Don’t give up.
This is only the beginning.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“Twice in my life now, I have buried myself in finery. Twice, I have arranged myself within a great compilation of fabric to prove that I understand the importance of a moment. It's clothing as contrition - a performance of beauty I have to put on to pay penance to the people gathered to acknowledge me. They are here to see me. And I must apologize for requesting their attention. Must make up for the weight of my demand by ensuring that looking at me will be a pleasant thing. Never mind the suffocation of the outfit, never mind the expense, never mind the impracticality. The transaction must be made. My efforts at beauty in exchange for their regard. And so, twice in my life, I have worn the cost of that recognition.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“I regret nothing: it was worth it for the hats alone.”
― Sarah Gailey, River of Teeth

“If you are loved, then you cannot be replaced.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“I didn’t mean to kill Josh Harper.
Really, I didn’t. It’s just that I was nervous and condoms are more complicated than I was expecting, and one thing led to another and— well.
Now there’s blood everywhere and he’s dead.”
― Sarah Gailey, When We Were Magic

“The internal battle between doing the right thing and doing the honest thing and doing the tempting thing was an ongoing one,”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“A twenty-five-cent word sprang unbidden into my mind: “noctilucent.” The word described the glow of a cat’s eyes at night, but it also seemed right for the woman in the photograph. She was a moonbeam turned flesh, pale with white-blond hair and wide-set light green eyes. Beautiful was not an appropriate word; she looked otherworldly. She looked impossible.”
― Sarah Gailey, Magic for Liars

“Serendipity is just as cruel as it is kind.”
― Sarah Gailey, Just Like Home

“She didn't relish being called "sweetheart," but something deep in her chimed at the word: this was a man who would let her go, if she was nice and pliant and didn't cause trouble. This was a man who wanted her to be the kind of woman who liked to hear "sweetheart," and that was a role she knew how to play.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“In the early twentieth century, the Congress of our great nation debated a glorious plan to resolve a meat shortage in America. The idea was this: import hippos and raise them in Louisiana’s bayous. The hippos would eat the ruinously invasive water hyacinth; the American people would eat the hippos; everyone would go home happy. Well, except the hippos. They’d go home eaten. Much to everyone’s disappointment, Congress didn’t follow through on the plan, and today America lives a cursed life—a beef life, with nary a free-range hippo within the borders of our country.”
― Sarah Gailey, River of Teeth