Zoje Stage > Quotes

“It was hard to pour endless love into someone who wouldn't love you back. No one could do it forever”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“She resented her body's betrayal. She still couldn't express how insecure it made her, how she lived on a precipice. The most basic parts of her could fail, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“Sometimes she struggled with resentment watching her family eat a meal that she prepared. People took eating and shitting for granted, like the continuous beating of their hearts, the inevitable protection of their skin. They didn't think about their intestines doing everything wrong, fucking up the basic process of digestion.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“. . . her energy existed in precious spools that came unwound faster than she liked.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“How much had her young brain already misconstrued? Observing, absorbing. Warping, twisting. Drawing conclusions about everything they did.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“She needed to disconnect a few times a day, like a battery in reverse that recharged when it wasn’t plugged in.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“The baby wasn't supposed to remind her of an internal mass of pooling waste.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“Now that she knew the name of the game - Scare Mommy - she should be able to defend herself. But goosebumps rose on her skin, even under the heat of the water, when she thought about her creepy daughter. The whites of her eyes. Her ability to sneak up on her as she slept.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“Sociopaths are liars who manipulate toward a desired outcome, but they tend not be as callous as psychopaths. Psychopathy can be genetic, the structure of the brain, and it can include chemical and physical components—a lesion on a particular part of the brain, not unlike the sociopath—but it’s marked by more-aggressive, remorseless traits: where a sociopath might manipulate, the psychopath attacks”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“Words, ever unreliable, were no one’s friend.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“But she knew how adults thought. They liked what they could see right in front of them, solid things. They encouraged imagination but hated anything imaginary.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“She dreaded all the necessary doctor appointments where she was supposed to surrender her own privacy and fears of being tortured for the benefit of the baby. Like it was already someone else's body and their needs superseded her own.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“It was hard to pour endless love into someone who wouldn’t love you back. No one could do it forever.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“Hanna loved how the pencils and crayons looked, with their pointy unused tips. She liked the quarter-size circles of watercolor paint, like frozen puddles from a dripping rainbow.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“We had an accident--'
Suzette cut Alex off. 'Hanna's trying to kill me.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“Hanna kept her words to herself because they gave her power. Inside her, they retained their purity. She scrutinized Mommy and other adults, studied them. Their words fell like dead bugs from their mouths. A rare person, like Daddy, spoke in butterflies, whispering colors that made her gasp. Inside, she was a kaleidoscope of racing, popping, bursting exclamations, full of wonder and question marks. Patterns swirled, and within every secret pocket she’d stashed a treasure, some stolen, some found.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“She felt unhinged, like any large noise would force her body parts to separate and trail off into space in a slow-motion explosion. She wanted sleep. Real sleep.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“She couldn’t understand why she was supposed to be a robot and follow endless hours of obeying an evil master’s routine—even more rigid than Mommy’s. She wanted to be master of her own schedule, decide on her own when and where she sat. To think that children everywhere sat at similar desks in similar rooms following similar routines like they were all supposed to grow up and become the same person.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“It was hard to pour endless love into someone who wouldn't love you back. No one could do it forever.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“She would have killed for anything with Julius the Monkey on it.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“She told herself it wasn't wrong to do what she most felt like doing in that moment.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“She’d expected her heavy-duty medication—an injectable biological drug—to eliminate the worst of her Crohn’s symptoms. And it did. But as the inflammation receded, scar tissue built up around a narrowing in her intestine.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“At home, she was broken and useless; in the Canyon she had the same potential as the raven that flew circles above her head.”
― Zoje Stage, Getaway

“To think that children everywhere sat at similar desks in similar rooms following similar routines like they were all supposed to grow up and become the same person.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“Yet, for all the hours Imogen spent as an adult cocooned in her apartment, she still wasn’t sure if she’d ever felt truly at home anywhere. Sometimes in the company of a tree—or a creek, or a moss-covered rock, or a desert night haloed by the Milky Way—she felt the tension inside her finally relent. There—out there—was a place where she belonged.”
― Zoje Stage, Getaway

“Being a mom can be a lonely job too, sometimes other people don’t see that. The child’s the center of your universe.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“As they made their way up the walk, Hanna spoke again, in her soft new voice. “Do you trust me?” Suzette considered how to respond. It seemed wrong to lie when asked so directly—and it being their first real conversation. “No,” she said. “Good. They were right to burn me.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“Mommy had turned into a balloon, and she wanted to pop her with a pin and watch her fizzle-fuzzle into nothingness.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“She didn’t like to be corrected. But she always enjoyed seeing Mommy like this, in her natural state of hating and giving up. If only Daddy could see it, then he’d understand that Mommy was phony.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“one with her hand outstretched offering to take her back to Mommy, like that was some sort of reward.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth