Vendela Vida > Quotes

“Recently, everything around me felt familiar yet amiss, like the first time you ride in the back seat of your own car.”
― Vendela Vida, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

“People pretend things didn't happen. Or so what, they happened, it's okay. Well, it's never okay. It's always ruined.”
― Vendela Vida, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

“When it comes to books...They're like lifelong friends to me; I need to know they're there, even if I don't check in with them on a regular basis.”
― Vendela Vida

“...and on some nights in bed, in that moment before sleep erased the day, I would picture the way the sky in Lapland looked the morning I left, how the train had sped south beneath a sky that was brighter than it had been in weeks. It had pulsed with reds and oranges, as though hiding a beating heart.”
― Vendela Vida, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

“Even the air between them seemed to be dented, waiting to be straightened again.”
― Vendela Vida, The Lovers

“That was the same week my physics teacher taught my class the concept of infinity. I cried about it every night for months.”
― Vendela Vida, And Now You Can Go

“We are thirteen, almost fourteen, and these streets of Sea Cliff are ours.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides

“I run to the water's edge and the cold ocean licks my toes. Without touching my face I can feel that it's wet with fog and tears and sweat. I stand there, on the cusp of the ocean and listen to its loud inhale. And then it recedes and takes everything from my childhood with it the porcelain dolls, the tap-dancing shoes, the concert ticket stubs, the tiny trophies, and the long, long swing.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides

“Lazlo's mom, Ágota, and my dad had a falling out over the kinds of things siblings usually have falling outs over: money and love. My father made money and Aunt Ágota lost money. Then there was disagreement about how their mother, my grandmother, should live. My father thought a retirement home. Ágota wanted to be paid to take care f her. The argument didn't help anyone. In the end, my grandmother died anyway.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides

“Sometimes we watch Bill Murray movies with him and his friends at his house on Sea View Terrace and marvel at the way the boys can recite all the lines the way we know every word of The Outsiders.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides

“We are thirteen, almost fourteen, and these streets of Sea Cliff are ours. We walk these streets to our school perched high over the Pacific and we run these streets to the beaches, which are cold, windswept, full of fishermen and freaks. We know these wide streets and how they slope, how they curve toward the short, and we know their houses.”
― vendela vida, We Run the Tides

“This is the way of air travel: fellow passengers applaud because they didn't die, and then they cut in front of you so they can exit four seconds earlier.”
― Vendela Vida, The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

“Her nonchalance unnerves me.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides

“At the Konya bus station,”
― Vendela Vida, The Lovers

“How do you feel?" Ewa asks.

"Betrayed."

"By who?" she says.

"Whom," I say.

"Who?"

"I feel betrayed by my femininity.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides

“You were always so into reading your stories,” she says. And you were so into making up yours, I want to say. But we’ve grown up now, and so I refrain.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides

“hands you his business card and requests that you tell your”
― Vendela Vida, The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

“They are tired of each other already. Either that, I think, or they’re going to go fuck after this. I have many different and somewhat contradictory ideas of how adult seduction works.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides

“I feel a loosened Band-Aid release itself from my ankle and fall off, but I don't turn around to pick it up. I don't care about litter because I am immortal.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides

“Chapter 23 Chapter”
― Vendela Vida, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name: A Novel

“I hope my girls don't grow up to be models," Maria Fabiola says. But there is something in her voice that implies that this will be difficult to fight-their beauty will pull them inexorably toward modelhood.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides

“In the bathroom, I see someone who looks like me but is paler and bloated.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides

“As we cruise smoothly and steadily through the night, it feels like we’re on a boulevard built only for us.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides

“For a moment I am taken out of time and place—I could be a schoolgirl on China Beach, gossiping with my best friend.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides

“She can’t wink with just one eye, so she shuts both her eyes, and for a moment it looks like she’s making a wish.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides

“We grew up very near each other,” Maria Fabiola says. This is what it’s come to. I am a childhood neighbor, nothing more.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides

“The geography of California was so embedded in my past, in my missteps, that I decided I had to flee.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides

“And I feel as I did when I was thirteen—that her laughter is a reward, that her attention is a prize.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides

“stand there, on the cusp of the ocean and listen to its loud inhale. And then it recedes and takes everything from my childhood with it—the porcelain dolls, the tap-dancing shoes, the concert ticket stubs, the tiny trophies, and the long, long swing.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides

“We love you," my dad says, and mother nods. My mother my shows her love in every way possible but has a hard time saying the word. My dad and I have had many conversations about why this might be; we think it's because she's lost so many people she's said the word "love" to. Half her family is dead.”
― Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides