Emily Arsenault > Quotes

“Self-defense is an act that implies you have something valuable to defend. After the instinct, you begin to wonder. What, specifically, was I aiming to save? What, beyond instinct, makes life worth saving?”
― Emily Arsenault, The Broken Teaglass

“It seems to me there are things we should have talked about. Like, what happens if you think you've found the love of your life, but you notice, whenever you go into the city together, that he walks ahead of you in the subway station, and doesn't look behind for you until after he's gotten on the subway? And what if you find yourself wishing you did not have to tell him to wait for you? What if being with him starts to mean having to say those things..."Honey, what for me?" And you start to resent him making you do that in order to keep him walking by your side?”
― Emily Arsenault, Miss Me When I'm Gone

“If you can’t get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”
― Emily Arsenault, The Leaf Reader

“The art of tea-leaf reading—or tasseomancy—is an ancient one. The practice spread from the Orient to Europe with the trade and consumption of tea. Of course, it borrows much from other ancient forms of divination.”
― Emily Arsenault, The Leaf Reader

“You didn’t ask me what I’m doing.” “What are you doing?” I asked. “Sewing a button on my shirt. It fell off in the wash but I was lucky I found it.” “Congratulations.”
― Emily Arsenault, The Last Thing I Told You

“And I think the lesson is not that we can all grow to be beautiful, but there is a place of love and comfort for all of us, somewhere, somehow, if we endure for long enough to find it. Don’t you think, ma’am? I don’t know, Tessa. To me, the cruelty is more memorable than the rare and lucky fate of the ending.”
― Emily Arsenault, The Evening Spider

“Am I supposed to like having a tongue stuck into my mouth? Is that supposed to be practice for having a dick in there? Could you explain this to me? Because I'd really like to know.”
― Emily Arsenault, The Last Thing I Told You

“I bought copies of Martha Stewart Living and quickly gained an appreciation for her misunderstood perfectionism. It made complete sense to me, overcompensating for one’s dark soul with tres leches cupcakes and clafouti”
― Emily Arsenault, The Last Thing I Told You

“Of course, it was not blood that attracted me to the Mary Stannard affair—not at first. It was not the violence or even the scandal. It was the way all of the minute elements of it promised to affect the outcome. It was that lovely notion that if you broke the event and its objects into enough tiny parts, and examined them thoroughly enough, you could arrive at the truth.”
― Emily Arsenault, The Evening Spider