Clémence Michallon > Quotes

“You don’t forget your first. You never forget the boy who taught you how to survive as a stranger in your own body.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“It’s embedded in you, once you’ve been a girl. You pass them on the street. You hear their laughs. You feel their pain. You want to lift them into your arms and carry them over to the end point, sparing their feet from the thorns that drew blood from your own. Every girl in the world is a little bit me, and every girl in the world is a little bit mine.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“...when a lot of sad stuff happens in a pretty short time, you reach a point where you can’t cry anymore.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“What the stories never said: at the end of the day, if a man wants to kill you, he kills you. It’s not on you to convince him not to.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“Every girl in the world is a little bit me, and every girl in the world is a little bit mine. Even yours. Even the one that's half you.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“You never expect evil to smell nice. What kind of devil wears cologne?”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“I’m sorry,” you tell him.

You are so sorry, all the time. You are sorry his wife is dead. You are sorry, truly so, about the injustices of the world, the way they’ve befallen him. You are sorry he’s stuck with you, such a needy woman, always hungry and thirsty and cold, and so nosy at that.

Rule number two of staying alive in the shed: he’s always right, and you’re always sorry.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“Rule number one of staying alive in the shed: He always wins. For five years, you have made sure of it.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“The truth is I want someone to laugh at my jokes, especially the stupid ones, and I want someone who will see me and not run the other way.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“People told you to say no. They never said how. They made it very clear that the world wouldn’t stop for you and that it was your responsibility to make it slow down, but no one ever gave instructions beyond that. No one told you how to look into the eyes of the person you love and say you want to stop.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“Now you know. The photos confirm it. For days before, he trailed you. Studied you. Picked you. Prepared for you.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“This is the story I tell myself. No one’s around to tell me it doesn’t make sense. It starts out as a tribute and ends in selfishness. It isn’t about her. Not really. It’s about me and the parts of my life that find me in the dark. It’s about me and my younger self and the way she looks at me, the way she keeps calling out to me, demanding answers I don’t have.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“You learn to hate the sound of your own voice at an early age, when you’re a girl.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“People say friendship but they mean love. It’s all love at the end of the day.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“Bottom line is, people don’t answer texts sometimes and it doesn’t mean anything’s wrong. Life just happens.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“People told you to say no. They never said how.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“Look at it,” I say. “Surveying his domain. Hunting for prey. He’s so beautiful.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“She hasn’t been found.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“You start running, even though you know that it will, over time, ruin your body. Split your bones, stiffen your muscles, gnaw on your tendons. You learn to like it, the fire in your rib cage, your lungs a conduit for the storm raging inside of you. You run, because you only know how to destroy yourself in healthy ways.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“No one waits for their dead to come back to life. Eventually, people will stop looking for you. They will stop showing your picture. They will let you fade away. They will stop telling your story, until one day you're the only one left to remember it.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“You start suspecting that bad things might, one day, happen to you. Somewhere in a corner of your heart, you hope to be exempt.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“His fist slams against the dashboard. “That bitch,” he says in a voice I don’t recognize. “I should have killed her a long time ago.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“Nunca se te olvida el chico que te enseñó a sobrevivir como una extraña en tu propio cuerpo.”
― Clémence Michallon, La inquilina silenciosa

“I found you,” he says. “You were lost. I gave you a roof. I keep you alive.” He points to the empty Tupperware. “Know what you’d be, without me? Nothing. You’d be dead.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“He closes the door softly. Your throat tightens. You have no idea what he’s up to. You can’t get a read on him. Your ability to stay alive has depended on this,”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“What he doesn’t realize: that you know, now, that the world isn’t just a place where things happen to you. That you can happen to the world too.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“He loves being my dad. He drives me around. He buys me clothes. He cooks for me. He cares about what’s in my head. He teaches me things. He wants me to know what he knows.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“He takes his phone out of his pocket and leans toward me. I smell pine needles and laundry detergent and freshly shampooed hair. I want to close my eyes and commit the combination to memory so I can remember it at night, search for him next time I wash my clothes or go for a hike.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“That at the end of the day, the only person you can truly count on is yourself.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant

“That you know, now, that the world isn’t just a place where things happen to you. That you can happen to the world too.”
― Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant