Amber Sparks > Quotes

“There were no books in the Afterwards, which the people thought was some serious bullshit.”
― Amber Sparks

“Maybe then he would have understood her better, understood how suffering steals the aptitude for happiness from you. Maybe he would have been okay with her melancholy then.”
― Amber Sparks, And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories & Other Revenges

“Eventually decomposition strips you bare, even in that solid oak you've taken the shape of. You've helped, finally, to enrich something around you, by feeding the soil with your skin and fat and muscle. Now the soil is full of phosphorus, potassium, calcium, and especially nitrogen. Now the soil is supremely satisfied, and you'd be okay with that. You always did like growing things. You always were better with plants than people.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“She thinks now that she has always been a person that needs layers. Not a scarf or a sweater, but walls between her and other people. A series of homes within homes. A series of places to hide.”
― Amber Sparks, May We Shed These Human Bodies

“Death is the opposite of lonely, and lonely is the only thing the janitor owns. It is the only thing that's hers. And that makes loneliness beautiful, out here among the cold and bright beginnings.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“She wants him like she wanted to fly from the rooftop when she was ten, wants to throw her whole body into that catastrophe until she is utterly exhausted and dried up.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“Fingerprint, he writes. A map to mark the spaces you've inhabited. A map you make yourself, quadrant by quadrant, inch by inch, until the landscape of your life looks like a vast and unexplored terrain. Here there be monsters, it will say.”
― Amber Sparks

“It hurts not to watch her, that’s how bright she is, like light off glass.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“Lavoisier's wife's, let us repeat, translated a s***load of science books into another language just so her husband, audience of one, could understand what they said.”
― Amber Sparks, And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories & Other Revenges

“You were a negative, a dark absence, a clump of cells crying to come together. You were a pause in the flickering before consciousness. And when the atoms swirled, and when the skies yawned, and when a nervous god, still virgin to creation, called you forth: did you marvel at your
luck? Clumsy thumbprint of an awkward deity—did you slaughter the heavens, once freed? Did you grab the stars by their throats? Did you wear the skins of dead galaxies, your eyes ablaze with impossible fury?”
― Amber Sparks, The Desert Places

“She doesn't know about metaphors but she knows that even the smallest human vessel has boundless storage for sorrow.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“Was that the point of suffering: to understand, in some way, what you still had? To clarify it, to rip the stars from the sky and hold them in the hand like diamonds‒to darken all the rest but the most glittering, glad memories? Was that the way to live a sunny life?”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“And what is history, anyway, but the chance to dig up our skeletons and give them new stories ?”
― Amber Sparks, And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories & Other Revenges

“APOPHENIA. The human tendency to seek patterns in random nature, where there are no patterns to be found. See also: ghosts, gambling, and the passions of religious mania and prophecy. See also: what happens when your lover’s brain breaks down while the world is burning.
I was born the day they found a face on Mars. It was a lie, of course; it was a geographical anomaly, a trick of the terrain. We want so badly to make sense of the cosmos, to see it in ourselves. We turn shadows into sockets, bright smears into mouths and eyes.
We turn the universe into our mirror. #narcissus, naturally.”
― Amber Sparks, And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories & Other Revenges

“Mrs. Peters in the seventh grade accused me of being a goth and my dear parents (Dear Mother and Dearest Stepfather, I’ll probably have forgiven you by the time I’m dead, perhaps) sent me to the Catholic girls’ school in Kent to retrain me, and really, is there anything more inclined to train someone to think exclusively of death—manner and method of, and What Lies Beyond—than a Catholic school education?”
― Amber Sparks, And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges

“You’ll do it? you asked, You’ll make the crown for me? and I understood then: this sex was never about love, never about your own body’s need. It was about mine, and how you knew it would undo me in the end. It always has, this great need to melt the world in the flames of passion, to burn everything down behind me, even in the savage dream of these sorry times we inhabit.”
― Amber Sparks, And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges

“She almost wishes for another love affair, sometimes, just to be able to end it. Just to feel that door close once more. Would that be true love ? The relief of loneliness, replayed forever and ever ?”
― Amber Sparks, And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories & Other Revenges

“She isn't sure whether she believes in God or not, though she always told her pastor she did. She isn't sure any woman ought to believe in God.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“Sure that starlight will strip away the years, will fall upon a thirteen-year-old girl alone on a dirt road, a bruise on her face and the mop clenched painfully in her broken fist. The things, the nightmare things fear could claim you for. The dark hurts in the veins, the heart-deep hurts in the buried parts of the body. The faces that chase her, even now, even in the farthest fields of space where nothing grows, nothing whispers, nothing lives or dies but the first things that ever got made in the universe. She isn’t sure whether she believes in God or not, though she always told her pastor she did. She isn’t sure any woman ought to believe in God.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“Is the Future a nice place for girls, the queen asked, and the fit woman snorted. Not exactly, she said. But - and she eyed the queen's cloak and shoes and hair - better than where you come from.”
― Amber Sparks, And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories & Other Revenges

“She was her father’s daughter but she’d inherited her mother’s black anger. It burned through her sometimes like a chemical fire, brief and devastating and utterly unstoppable.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“he shriveled, and he husked without her. It is this the robots cannot understand. That human love is mostly failure. That failure may be very sad, but it is yours, and you hold on to it if you can.”
― Amber Sparks, And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges

“This is love for me, she said. I am not a good woman, she said. I am the end of all things, she said. This was at the beginning. He shook his head. You are life, he said, and I invite you in.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“Everywhere there is fever and passion, everywhere a need to burn, burn, burn out the hurt. We write, we sing, we paint, and still the blackness follows, still the dead are there in every note, every brushstroke. We ride and ride, farther and faster and still, still the ghosts ride with us, keep pace behind us, mock all our efforts to smoke and sweat them out.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“He understood that the most important things in the world were the kind you made up for yourself.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“She doesn’t have the capacity to undo metaphors.”
― Amber Sparks, May We Shed These Human Bodies

“Fern wondered if every Middle of Nowhere looked the same, if they were all full of the same grab bag of building blocks: square gray stores, dumpy churches, sad small fields, wide highways kept smoother than any street in town. The same feeling of being emptied out, instead of just empty.”
― Amber Sparks, Happy People Don't Live Here

“She'll push and push through until those long-ago rooms are hers again ; until she finds a new set of stages for a new set of lives.”
― Amber Sparks, And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories & Other Revenges

“Fingerprint, he writes. A map to mark the spaces you’ve inhabited. A map you make yourself, quadrant by quadrant, inch by inch, until the landscape of your life looks like a vast and unexplored terrain. Here there be monsters, it will say.”
― Amber Sparks, May We Shed These Human Bodies

“That human love is mostly failure. That failure may be very sad, but it is yours, and you hold on to it if you can.”
― Amber Sparks, And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories & Other Revenges