Sarah McCarry > Quotes

“You think that the world we live in is ordinary. We make noise and static to fill the empty spaces where ghosts live. We let other people grow our food, bleach our clothes. We seal ourselves in, clean the dirt from our skins, eat of animals whose blood does not stain our hands. We long ago left the ways of our ancestors, oracles and blood sacrifice, traffic with the spirit world, listening for the voices out of stones and trees. But maybe sometimes you have felt the uncanny, alone at night in a dark wood, or waiting by the edge of the ocean for the tide to come in. We have paved over the ancient world, but that does not mean we have erased it.”
― Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs

“You are not like other girls. You are not like other girls ("You are not like other girls," the boys you run with will tell you, and you will try not to let them see you preen under the glancing light of their approval). You learn their books and their language. You laugh at their jokes. You listen to their stories, sit blank-eyed on their couched while they play video games, pass them your English notes. You keep their secrets. You use the words they use about other girls in order to assure yourself that they will never use those words about you. You make yourself into nothingness, a ghost conjured into being only through the desires of boys, the rules of boys, the ideas of boys. You're not like other girls.”
― Sarah McCarry, Here We Are

“I’m a chalkboard that’s been erased over and over again until there’s nothing left but a haze of white dust. Before this I never understood how long an hour could take, how many ticks of the second hand are in a minute, how endless the space between seconds can be.”
― Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs

“The hard way is my favorite way to learn.”
― Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs

“All the cells in my body rearrange, compass needles pointing to his north.”
― Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs

“It's spring giving way to summer, balmy air smelling of roses, hot skin meeting the cold shock of the ocean, starry nights as warm as kisses.”
― Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs

“Whatever is happening here, it definitely bypassed go and went straight to really fucking weird without collecting two hundred dollars.”
― Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs

“It will take you long, lonely years, but one day you will grow tired. Tired of boys, tired of contempt, and then where will you be? All these girls around you with their stories and their lives, the solace of one another, and you will be as far away from them as an anthropologist among a foreign people, curious but unable to make contact. Have faith: you will learn.”
― Sarah McCarry, Here We Are

“Kissing him is like falling into a river, some great fierce current carrying me outside of my body, and all around us the music of the water rises and rises, and I can hear the wind moving over the sand, the distant singing of the stars veiled behind their curtain of blue sky, the slow, resonant chords of the earth turning on its axis.”
― Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs

“The boys who have done you harm are surrounded by girls you will choose never to be. girls who are disgusting, who bleed and weep and wail. Girls who spend too much time in the bathroom. Girls who are never ready on time. Girls who titter, who are soft, who wear pretty clothes that are easily dirties, girls in hoop earrings and perfect wings of black eyeliner, girls who don't know what's cool. Girls who read the wrong books, twirl their hair around, are pursued, are hunted. You will remake yourself into something else: a boys' girl, a tough girl, a girl without needs or feelings, a girl who wisecracks and drinks whiskey in the backseat of cars, a girl cool as the first frost in winter, a girl so totally unlike other girls. If you cannot be loved and safe, you will be clever, mean, a girl as vicious as the serrated edge of a hunting knife. If you cannot be pretty, you will disdain beauty and its trappings. If you cannot be heard, you will be silent on purpose. You will find your knights again, a different set of boys, this time united against a common enemy: the softness and fragility of girls, of anything girlish within you, of anything girlish in any other girl. Against girls who are sad and silly and weeping (you don't cry), girls who complain (you protest nothing), girls who make demands (you never ask). This time, however, you will not be queen. Some of these boys will never even know your name.”
― Sarah McCarry, Here We Are

“You’re a fairy princess beaming at me, remaking the world in your image. Wiping away everything that hurts. But someday everything that hurts will come back and kill you.”
― Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs

“... Although it was hard to tell, with bluegrass, wether or not they were supposed to sound like geese.”
― Sarah McCarry, About a Girl

“How can someone be so close to you and then so far away in the span of a single movement?”
― Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs

“Does he touch her the way he touched me. *”
― Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs

“You think that the world we live in is ordinary. We make noise and static to fill the empty spaces where ghosts live.”
― Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs

“Who among us has not wanted to be transformed? I had lived all my life surrounded by extraordinary people, and some nights I would fall asleep wishing to wake up worthy of them.”
― Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs

“Why aren’t you working on your own books?, the vampire asks me.
I’m waiting, I tell him, until I have something to say.
No one else seems to be, he says.”
― Sarah McCarry, Blue is a Darkness Weakened by Light

“When the music stops the hole inside me is so huge I think I might die from it. Without”
― Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs

“I think it is best to know what you are and make peace with it.”
― Sarah McCarry

“Stay frosty, motherfuckers!” she bellows at the frat boys, and then she kisses me.”
― Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs

“Here is my life, this life I never knew I could have, here is the whole world waiting for me, all the possible things. My future is as big as the wild night, the wine-dark sea.”
― Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs

“Being human, the vampire said, is a skill it is useful to outgrow.”
― Sarah McCarry, Blue is a Darkness Weakened by Light