Sarah Henstra > Quotes

“Adam," my brother said, "let's not be the type of people who are afraid to live because we might die.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“You undid me, Kurl, in more ways than one.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“How is anybody supposed to hide happiness like this?”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“We’re all bending over backward to get you to crack a smile, because when you smile it feels like the sun coming out.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“Maybe it is always like this. We are granted these tiny windows of time, these small pockets of space, where nothing else intrudes. Maybe that's all we can ever hope to get, together. And maybe, just maybe, it will be enough.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“let’s not be the type of people who are afraid to live because we might die.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“I am jealous. I’m envious of the easy options all the rest of you enjoy. To date someone or not to date someone? Does she like him? Does he like her? You can try out whatever you like and change your minds at any time. Everyone is available to everyone else. Me? I might be permitted to admire someone from afar, to harbor a yearning in secret, but to act on it would cost me everything.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“...it looks like this whole earth was just reborn into an entirely new universe full of possibilities.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“Your scent, Jo. It’s like wool and bread and something else. I don’t know. A scent like if laughter had a scent, or daybreak. You filled the whole car with a yellow light like daybreak. I swear it felt like light pouring into my veins.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“It wasn’t just the heat of the moment. Ask me for anything. The answer is yes.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“I want to walk down the hallways of Lincoln High with one part of me in the eternal, the timeless, and the other part of me slipping so fast through the here and now that nobody can pin me down, not even the butcherboys.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“My beautiful, laughable fable of a life.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“I don't know what was in my head before I met you. What did I even think about? Because whatever it was, it's not in there anymore. It's gone. I am completely, one hundred percent all the time filled up with you.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“A word kept flashing in my head. One word, over and over, like a flashing neon sign. Lucky.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“Like that time you were half-asleep and rolled with your shoulder in my larynx and said, “Can you breathe?” And I couldn’t really but didn’t need to either, because air seemed unnecessary with all that happiness in my chest.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“It’s an amazing phenomenon: Every time I reread your letter that says “Ask me for anything,” I find there is nothing more I need or want.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“The sight of you shot something strong and bright through my veins. I swear my mouth started to water. It must be how a dog feels when its master comes home. Joy coursing through its whole body.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“These little things you do. All the little gestures, your quick nervous fingers. I watch you do these things and I think, how could I ever be unhappy? How could anything ever bother me?”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“And then I'll read one of your letters and think, People have no idea what I'm like. I mean the gap between what people see and what's actually in my head sort of shocks me when I read your letters. I guess everyone has this gap. It's just that they don't come face-to-face with it very often.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“Maybe I am "queer as in weird", as you theorize so eloquently. But my weirdness is merely a natural by-product of having my sight in something beyond high school, namely poetry.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“I was asleep almost before I could close the flap on the tent.
Sleeping all day. This must be one of the ways people hide from pain.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“the halo lady robed me in blue or green, like the virgin, but it was always more agreeable to imagine myself as christ. picture me crucified, i thought. i posed with outstretched arms, and i imagined blood trickling from my pierced palms”
― Sarah Henstra, The Red Word

“What I wrote about in the essay was about grass growing from the mouths of corpses.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“It's not fatal when it's a shallow dive. Was that the sum of my philosophy? ... Maybe all that I wanted, all along, was to dabble, to dip toes only, to skim for dross instead of plunging deep.”
― Sarah Henstra, The Red Word

“o bruce. i know full well you were never real. i know i fashioned you out of the depths of my longing, an idol to worship in the darkness of my own salvage heart. i erected you and excepted you from every rule and made you lawless, blameless, soulless, footless, until it inevitable you should tumble. still i keep hauling the stones for you, bruce. i keep heaping the stones, and laying on the timbers, and piling the brush, and striking the match. but you won't go quietly to your pyre. you won't stay put. o goldbright boy who lives in my blood, you've coursed your way through me for fifteen years. my heart is damned with you.”
― Sarah Henstra, The Red Word

“But my weirdness is merely a natural by-product of having my sights set on something beyond high school, namely poetry.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“Now - right now, right this second - is the only time we are alive. Our minds can live in the past or worry about the future, but our bodies are only alive and feeling things right here, right now.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“this is the trouble with myth. each of us scoops out our own rotten core and spits it out onstage. we stand around the heap of smoking corpses and declare it fate.”
― Sarah Henstra, The Red Word

“is helen even meant to be understood as a flesh-and-blood woman? is helen a mere apparition of male desire? is helen a commodity to be traded amongst men in the warrior economy? is helen, herself born of rape, an emblem of female victimhood?”
― Sarah Henstra, The Red Word

“They don’t”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes