Ally North > Quotes

“Maybe shame needed your permission to enter in. Maybe it was a manmade construct, like time.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Genesis

“Because everyone leaves in the end. Everyone. Sooner you accept that you’re on this wreck of a planet alone the sooner you can get on with makin’ the best of it.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Genesis

“4. I dream about you every goddamn night. Every time I even close my eyes. But my dreams blur the edges and I’m driving myself mad thinking that one day that’s all I’ll have left of you. Blurred edges in my dreams.   5. I want you to know that I”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus

“It is fitting then, your name. For one who falls only to rise again.” “Dabai?” Abby tried it again, feeling the weight of it on her tongue. “What does it mean?” “Sun,”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus

“How dare they. How dare they use God to justify such blatant evil.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Genesis

“I know why you didn’t run,” Abby whispered. “You should’ve, but I know why you didn’t. I love her too.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus

“Maybe shame needed your permission to enter in. Maybe it was a manmade construct”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Genesis

“I listened to you, now you listen to me,” she said, her tone gentle, but there was an undercurrent there—something dangerous just beneath. “I’ve changed. I’m better than I was because I wanted to be better for the children. For Lewis. For you. I fucked up, I shouldn’t have left you, I shouldn’t have—” she gestured, grimacing, “the chloroform. Was a poor choice.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus

“For anyone who has suffered at the hands of small-minded people, and for all those still battling the lingering ghosts of religious trauma.   ”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Genesis

“Remember what you told me? About anger and happiness and how you get to choose?” He nodded, slow and careful. “Family is like that too. When you’re old enough, you get to choose.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus

“It’s our great honor to welcome you,” he smiled, “to Bloom Town.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus

“Another lifetime. Another lifetime. Another lifetime.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Genesis

“didn’t say your name out loud because I knew it would take root in me. I didn’t say it out loud, but it was a constant prayer in my head these past weeks.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus

“Her eyes slid shut again, and that was when it happened; Joey, shifting slightly behind her, perhaps waking up from a short sleep herself. She kissed Abby’s spine, gentle and soft, then whispered quiet words into Abby’s skin. “Don’t leave me.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Genesis

“The sun may be a million miles away, but still it lights the moon.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus

“bartered and rationed. They expand upon each other; they grow and touch others and shed light into dark corners. You should want happiness all the more for the sorry state of the world so that you can share it.” She squeezed Abby’s hand, emphasizing her next words. “Stop being angry at yourself for living twenty-five years with the wrong idea about the world, and start imagining all the good you can do with the rest of your life, now that your eyes are wide open.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus

“Abby smiled. Olive had been the one to suddenly start calling them Mum and Mama one morning at breakfast. Simple as that—she’d just decided, unprompted, those were their names now.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus

“You’re the best person I’ve ever known, and it’s been a fuckin’ wonder gettin’ to know you. A privilege. And in another lifetime,” she leaned in, kissing Abby softly, one last time, “I’d love you with every piece of me left.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus

“Born with wings, flying at last.”
― Ally North, The Wilds & The Weeds

“cantankerous”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus

“Joey had just…she’d shot him. Right there in front of her.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus

“When you’re the preacher’s only child—only daughter, no less, it’s um. It’s hard? The entire town is always watching you. When you’re small you feel important because everyone knows who you are, everyone wants to be your friend.” Why was she telling Joey all this? “But when you get older, it’s as if those same people who adored you are just waiting for you to slip up. They seek gossip the way I imagine other people seek enlightenment or happiness. They crave it, just to distract themselves from how unremarkable their own lives are.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Genesis

“When we were leaving Wry, when I was ill…he said I hope you die. So he thinks it’s his fault.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus

“don’t kill him.” She couldn’t explain it, couldn’t understand it herself, but some hidden, primal part of her had flared to life in that instant. He was a monster. A madman. She hated him. And yet, she didn’t want to see him slain.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus

“That’s what I find confounding. He seems malevolent, this white man’s God, suffering his people to wander when he could have just led them. More confounding still—the people were content to wander, looking to the sky rather than to each other.” Abby shrugged. “I suppose it’s a question of which is crueler—believing in a false hope or not having any hope at all?” “Or perhaps it’s a question of which is wiser—to waste your life seeking a promised land, or to spend your life creating one?”  ”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus

“The circle of rope that had been tied around his waist dangled like a stretched noose. He’d slipped out of it.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus

“its own beauty, butchered and plated for consumption by small men made angry when beautiful things dared to exist outside of their possession.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Genesis

“You know how you reach a certain age and you realize your parents are just people? Like, just as flawed and fucked up as we are?”
― Ally North, The Wilds & The Weeds

“She’d saved Abby’s entire life only to run in the other direction, wholly convinced Abby was better off alone than anywhere near her.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus

“She was attached to a kite; a brilliant soaring thing, bright and colorful. Without it, she’d just be Abby.”
― Ally North, Bloom Town: Exodus