Eleanor Henderson > Quotes

“Jude's desire for girls was indiscriminate feverish and complete he wanted them all equally and he wanted them not at all. Blondes and brunettes big ones or small ones - they were cold fragile impenetrable creatures all desirable as they were undesirable all perfumed and pretty.”
― Eleanor Henderson, Ten Thousand Saints

“He, Teddy and Eliza entered the room just as someone was snapping a picture: they would be forever captured in a photo they didn't belong in, blinking against the flash.”
― Eleanor Henderson, Ten Thousand Saints

“She's too drunk to remember all the words, but it doesn't matter - he already knows them. It's his song, the one he was named for, and she's sung it since he was a baby. He knows all about carrying the world on your shoulders, all about letting her into your heart, all about making the sad song better.”
― Eleanor Henderson, Ten Thousand Saints

“and the sky was like a deep blue sheet unfurled above him, like the sheet his mother would put on his bed, letting it hang in the air for a moment before it dropped.”
― Eleanor Henderson, Ten Thousand Saints

“He knows all about carrying the world on your shoulders, all about letting her into your heart, all about making the sad song better.”
― Eleanor Henderson, Ten Thousand Saints

“Later, months later, when Jude thought back to the way it all went down -how did a burnout like him end up straight edge?- he'd remember that ambulance, just like the one he'd been unconscious inside. Its red cross, when viewed from the right angle, was an X on its side.”
― Eleanor Henderson, Ten Thousand Saints

“She cried. Her shoulders shook. It was terrible, the sound she made, the sound of her own strangled voice, and her hate stood up and turned on Genus. Juke had no intention of allowing them to marry - what a fool she'd been to believe his word! - but what kind of man would want to marry her? A girl with no tongue, a girl who made a sound like that? Was he as bad as Juke, loving only her silence after all, her weakness? What good would it do to tell him? What could he do to protect her? Quick as a whip, she slipped her arm from his hands and ran back to the big house.”
― Eleanor Henderson, The Twelve-Mile Straight

“Jude had witnessed all of this with the dejected respect one had for people with destructive talents, like winning hamburger-eating contests.”
― Eleanor Henderson, Ten Thousand Saints

“Something sometimes happens when someone dies, though. You're crying for the loss of that person, but for all the people you've lost before that, too.”
― Eleanor Henderson, Everything I Have Is Yours: A Marriage

“Girls irritated her, intimidated her, and finally bored her; around girls she became a territorial, sniffing their asses, showing her teeth. It was not a part of herself she liked. Around boys she was herself, she could relax; she had nothing to win but them.”
― Eleanor Henderson, Ten Thousand Saints

“The road gang was filled with men who had stolen bread and coats and tomatoes off the vine, some asking to be caught. He too found himself resigned to it.”
― Eleanor Henderson, The Twelve-Mile Straight

“You don't have to have shared a placenta with someone to sense their pain. Some would say that empathy is what makes us human. But I think empathy was here, an intuition. The thrumming awareness that we are all connected to the smallest speck, the most distant stars, by the great umbilicus of the solar system, the orbits tossing and tearing us with the force of the tides. When we pay attention to things like parasites and the moon, we are paying attention to the fact that we are citizens of the universe. Most of being human is an effort to forget.”
― Eleanor Henderson, Everything I Have Is Yours: A Marriage

“That was how Juke felt on the porch of String Wilson’s new house. He wanted, and he didn’t want to want.”
― Eleanor Henderson, The Twelve-Mile Straight

“Elma was filled with a funny combination of relief and regret. It was the feeling she had after getting a crying baby to sleep—even though she finally had some peace, she always felt a little lonesome.”
― Eleanor Henderson, The Twelve-Mile Straight