Emma Rathbone > Quotes

“I read it over and over again. I turned it over, turned it back, smoothed it out on my pillow and then read it some more. It was written on a piece of torn-out spiral notebook paper. It had seams like it had been folded and unfolded a few times. I looked into the manila envelope again to see if there was anything else. There wasn't.”
― Emma Rathbone, The Patterns of Paper Monsters

“Everyday we have to go to classroom 107A, where portions of English, math and social studies are meted out like different nutrients of a hospital diet.”
― Emma Rathbone, The Patterns of Paper Monsters

“I looked around the cafeteria. There was a little paper product city set-up on one of the folding tables next to the empty salad bar- stacks of napkins, towers of cups.”
― Emma Rathbone

“When we started walking to the computer room, I thought I was pretty prepared because I had managed to withdraw the balled-up outline worksheet from the paper graveyard under my bed.”
― Emma Rathbone, The Patterns of Paper Monsters

“And then I'd started to feel something I'd only glimpsed as a teenager, when it had been much easier to disregard -- actual, corrosive, adult loneliness; a crystalline, desolate feeling of abandonment.”
― Emma Rathbone, Losing It

“I pictured myself walking across the way, in the sun, wearing a backpack. And then, unexpectedly—a heavy bubble of happiness rose in me. It’s strange, but my instinct was to suppress it, because it somehow didn’t seem fitting. Why would you do that? Why would you feel the need to push down a feeling of joy that kicked up from the world? Just go with it, I told myself, because you never know. The grain of it doesn’t tell you anything about its volume.”
― Emma Rathbone, Losing It

“I began to think of that moment, when I pushed away from him and swam to the other side of the pool, as being where my fate changed, where I branched off and started living a parallel life that wasn't supposed to be.”
― Emma Rathbone, Losing It

“I couldn’t tell if every decision I’d made up to this point, every link that had led me here, had mattered a lot, or hadn’t mattered at all.”
― Emma Rathbone, Losing It

“If it didn't work when two people crashed together like cymbals on a summer afternoon, and then couldn't stop talking to each other, then when would it?”
― Emma Rathbone, Losing It

“I ignored him. And he saw me deciding to ignore him. And I guess you could say that it wasn’t a big deal, but a part of me knew that it was in these small transactions that unkindness could be most felling. I would have given anything to go back. But”
― Emma Rathbone, Losing It

“It could happen. It did happen. The train could pass, and disappear into the distance.”
― Emma Rathbone, Losing It

“She read with all the sensuality and absorption of a preteen girl, stocking-footed, sliding down the sofa, completely immersed, her hand foraging on the plate of cheese and crackers next to her like something with a life of its own. She”
― Emma Rathbone, Losing It

“Why were there so many women everywhere?”
― Emma Rathbone, Losing It