Emily Jane > Quotes

“The horizon was electric orange, fading to a cotton-candy pink, lavender, a soft cradle for fledgling Venus. Over the eastern ocean, the distant stars twinkled.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“how aliens had traveled from distant galaxies, across the vast where-no-man-has-gone-before reaches of space, to visit their B-list Earth, where the wild animals became frequently extinct but the domesticated ones got their own special matching rain boots and slickers, and their own wall plaque”
― Emily Jane, On Earth as It Is on Television

“Answers came when they damn well wanted to come, which was sometimes not at all. Answers were, in that respect, like cats.”
― Emily Jane, On Earth as It Is on Television

“They could forget about college. Maybe they didn't want college anyway. Maybe they didn't want degrees and titles and weekend workdays. They could live lives unburdened by transcripts, certificates, licenses, applications, dissertations, diversifications, stocks and bonds and dividends, insurance and annuities and 401(k)s, fashion trends, pantyhose, stuffy suit coats, bow ties, boring parties where the humans squandered irreplaceable minutes on suffocating small talk and no one partook in Dionysian pursuits and everyone went home early feeling empty inside despite the excesses of the cheese tray.”
― Emily Jane, On Earth as It Is on Television

“The Child Self is like a seed, or a snail, living deep underground within your Life Landscape. You’ve been taught to keep buried things buried.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“Timmy also had no mom and dad, and not because he had hatched out of an egg. His mom and dad got old and died because time happened really fast and this made Mason sad. He imagined time like a rocket ship. Warp speed! The ship was here and then it was gone. Time was just the space in between here and gone.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“The sign above the door said SEA LA VISTA, which meant see ya later, or something like that, which was either the exactly right or exactly wrong name for a haunted beach house.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“She was supposed to say something heartfelt, something meaningful enough to permeate the child-screen bond. Something her own mother might have said, in the slim band of time between work and bed, or work and work. She should have held them in her arms and assuaged the doubts that, well, honestly the doubts that belonged to her. She had been, in her distraction, unwittingly lenient with the children. She ignored them, and this led to excess YouTube. Too many snacks. Too often she let them subsist on plain noodles with butter. Now they were detached. She had sacrificed Quality Family Time for Mom’s Gotta Work. She had a flimsy excuse.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“She looked out at the sea, the realm of pirates and electric eels and scary fish-things with toothy cavernous mouths. She wished it was more regular, like the swimming pool. It was vast, glistening, crested with silver waves, glorious and terrifying.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“They all believed in monsters, in a world where monsters were stories that mothers told their children weren’t real.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“How are we living like this? Cowering in fear. Never knowing what will happen tomorrow, or the next night, or the night after that. Who will put a stop to it all?”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“Dad’s job was to gather the bedding from the floor and ask, Are you fighting battles in your sleep, and Mom’s job was to climb into bed beside Mason and scratch his back, and now he only got one or the other. Dad never scratched his back. Mom never picked up the sheets and blankets, not until bedtime came again. What are these still doing on the floor? she asked, and Mason wondered how Mom could be Very Smart but also not smart enough to solve this obvious mystery.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“NOTHING HAD HAPPENED yet on that morning of the first day of summer vacation, and anything and everything still might.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“She wouldn’t really eat all the Swedish Fish, she told herself. She would merely absorb them, and grow strong and spectacular.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“She had loved Philipia Bay when she wrote the first book. Maybe more than she loved Chuck, though present-day-Chuck inevitably colored her memory of past-Chuck with a douchey tint. She had wanted nothing more than to write more books with Philipia Bay, books brimming with treasure and romance, where villains got sent to prison or mauled by bears or devoured by snakes. Where everything turned out the way it should.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“A good start. But deciding to throw out the stale box of cereal was easy. The other decisions would be less easy, and she didn’t want to make them. Like the silverware set. It was boxy, plastic-handled, deficient in forks. She didn’t need an extraneous incomplete silverware set. She had eaten most of her childhood meals with silverware from that set.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“Dad always asked when he gathered the bedding that sleeping Mason had discarded. Are you fighting battles in your sleep? Mason wondered what sorts of battles, and against whom, and whether he won, and if so how, because he usually didn’t win. He always lost when he battled Evie. He never beat the boss level unless he asked for Evie’s help. He never won at rock, paper, scissors or sharks and minnows or freeze tag. He had lost his biggest battle ever, against Dad. Dad told him, Mason, I’m moving out, because, you see, when a dad feels… but Dad’s feelings made no sense and when Mason talked sensibly, Dad couldn’t hear him. Maybe Dad’s ears were broken, or clogged up, like when you got an infection and had to drink that gross pink medicine to fix it. Mason said louder, No, you can’t leave Mom, but Dad didn’t get the message so Mason yelled, NO YOU CAN’T LEAVE MOM and he punched and kicked and clawed. But nothing worked. KO. Battle lost. Dad left.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“My power sandwich.” She laughed, remembering the name she had given it as a child, on the beach in her neon surf-cat swimsuit, her arms strong and tan, her heart still hopeful, her best friend there at her side.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“The other two kids—her kids—went straight for the water. Never mind wet clothes. They were all stuck together in the Sisyphean cycle of keeping kids clean, exponentially more exhausting (for her) at the beach.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“Fear was a small little ball inside her. Like a knot, or a rock, or a seed. It made her clench around herself.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“didn’t matter in the plot coupon universe of Philipia Bay, where fish were just words on paper and a hundred faceless federal goons could perish in an instant, with zero emotional impact, which was what the fandom of Philipia Bay wanted. Snackable violence with a side of lust. Which was what she had wanted when she jettisoned all serious literary ambitions in favor of heaving bosoms and golden keys marked with mysterious hieroglyphics and four-inch stilettos with poison-throwing darts concealed inside the heels. No one could run in heels like that, in a low-cut cocktail dress, without a twisted ankle or a nip slip. Except for Philipia Bay. Philipia Bay could run in any pair of heels. After three martinis. While firing shots and leaping banisters and saving innocent bystanders who always stumbled into her path, just in time to be saved.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“She would never win Mother of the Year. But she would win points. The kids would use her benevolent sugar stance against Chuck. Mom lets us have cookies with lunch they would say, and her heart would be full.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“Her face was a kaleidoscope of expressions, happy and sad, resolute, afraid, wistful, mystified.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“They all knew that sand play was a slippery slope that led to swimming.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“You’re just some boring adult.” She stared back at him. She imagined herself, as seen by his eyes. Frumpy. Stern. Friendless. Overly concerned with stupid trivialities. Like muddy, sandy clothes. Wet footprints on the floor. Who cared! When life was so unquestionably short. “You’re not wrong,” she said, and she felt indignant but also forlorn.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“Maybe later Timmy would be their new brother. Minus one Dad. Plus one brother. Mason pondered the equation. New brother equals more people to play with but also more people to share toys with, and Timmy had come to this equation with zero toys of his own.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“An amalgamation of selves in the same Jenn shell. Evolved. Evolving. The electricity came back, and she was Magnanimous. She was flexible and forgiving. Chuck could take his List of Underminstances and shove it. His list. His underminstances. His resentments to carry, if he chose that burden. She brushed her bitterness aside. She preferred sweet.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“She pressed forward. Through the waves. Beneath. Where sound distorted. Where the steady beat of waves mingled with the woosh of the undertow, the glub glub of her escaping breath, the fast track of her own heart pumping blood through her veins. She came up. Inhaled deep. The air was salty and sweet, rank, strange. Unfamiliar, as if a vent had opened and the air that blew through its ducts came from a distant world, a world like this one, but where the story had already ended, and badly. She didn’t want that ending.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide

“If they occupied the planet long enough, it would be theirs. Which was how, one senator remarked, many Earth nations had been formed. By squatters. Which was why, another senator insisted, we ought to destroy them now.”
― Emily Jane, On Earth as It Is on Television

“The sea was stark and beautiful and danger lurked beneath its placid waves. Fake it till you make it, the sea said to itself, looking pretty, but deep down it was dark and full of wicked things.”
― Emily Jane, Here Beside the Rising Tide