Emma Pattee > Quotes

“We fall back into silence. Something like adrenaline starts beating its slow drum inside me. Maybe you’ll know this feeling one day—there’s nothing a woman hates more than walking by herself, and hearing a strange noise, or feeling the presence of an “other,” that horrible sickness all over my body, ground shifting, women are so unsafe, all of us always pretending to be safe, always avoiding any reminder that our safety is upheld only as long as the person closest to us keeps deciding not to kill us.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“Leave those dishes, I should have said. Come play with me in the forest, I should have said. The world will end tomorrow.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt

“People have done harder things than this. People have been through worse than this. Nobody I know, but still, people.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“There’s no way to explain to your father that some people make lists of all the ways that babies die and some people don’t.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“How do I explain a home to you, Bean? We fill them with dirt and dust and dishes and cat hair. Spend all our time looking on big and small screens at other people’s homes, wishing they were ours. Drive to places like IKEA in hopes that our homes will look more like the homes on our screens.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“People will tell you that everything is clear in hindsight, but really it’s just rewritten.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“Your father lives for a room of strangers to fall in love with him. He lives to be the man he is in a room full of strangers.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“The problem with so many years spent sitting so close to somebody is that you can tell yourself you’re being seen, but really you’ve disappeared, closed the blinds, nobody’s home.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt

“Calm down. The least calming words ever.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“Wow,” I say, all sweet. It’s a woman thing: the more scared you get, the nicer you have to be.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“The happiest people are the ones who want what they already have.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt

“Lately, time seems to move like that, like as soon as I get my hand firmly around a moment, it has turned to dust and there’s a new moment to try and grasp.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“The key to a happy life is wanting what you already have.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“For a second, we’re tilted”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“We’re at that stage where we’ve learned to live with our incomprehension of each other. Where it’s easier to nod like, oh yes, I see, than it is to ask for more.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“If it’s bad news, I don’t want to know. I want to pause here, in this moment, the moment before I know.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“But hasn’t it always been the other way around? Haven’t I always been flipping channels and browsing Pinterest while people died and struggled and starved?”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“Never turn your back on the ocean,” she used to say. “Or a Chihuahua.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“The man you marry is the man you get, my mother used to say. Meaning: men don’t change. My mother didn’t expect much from men. Not that she was immune to their charms. Men delighted her, fascinated her, the way tourists lean out of the car window to watch a tiger grooming itself in the sun. But nobody’s jumping out of the car for a tiger hug, you know? That was my mother, hands inside the vehicle, hands to herself, men better left sleeping outside in the jungle.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“I could have been anything. Gone anywhere.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“The ocean is a hoarder, you know. Keeping a collection of tchotchkes down there and then spitting them out, one by one, to remind us that it owns all of us.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“You and me, when we die, we’re going to evaporate back into the earth like we were never even here. Bodies made of air, bodies made of dirt.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“Each year somehow shorter than the year before.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“He hates this part of me, the part that goes into a room of strangers and decides that I don’t like any of them, and none of them like me either.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“I read somewhere that in the case of a natural disaster, you should not look strangers in the eye in case they die later and you’re forced to eat them. Or maybe it was the opposite. Maybe you’re supposed to look them in the eye and memorize all their clothes so you can tell their families that you saw them. Or maybe that wasn’t natural disasters, that was in case you get raped.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“For as long as I can remember, she made these tiny papier-mâché birds that she molded carefully with her hands and glued on little scraps of wood for the beaks, and twisted thin pieces of wire for the feet and then took this paintbrush that seemed to be just one tiny strand of hair and painted their little delicate faces, and the markings on their beaks and even the round white dots of their eyes. They were all types of birds: sparrows and robins but also tree pipits and magpies and goldfinches. She would spend hours studying each bird, their markings and the roundness of their head, and she knew all the anatomical terms: the mantle and the alula and the plumage and she would point these things out to me on the walks we took together. Why, how, did my mother start making her birds? I don’t know; I never asked.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“Women in Finland probably ride their bikes to the hospital to give birth all the time, bring their newborns home in the basket on the front.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“life is this powerful river,”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“And the glow, the glow of hearing the words that came from inside of you being spoken out loud, of having the things you wrote be listened to and therefore made important.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt

“The road in front of us looks wonky, tilted, like everything is sliding sideways.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel