Emily Temple > Quotes

“Girls love to be unlike other girls, because of the lies we are told about what other girls are like.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“It's strange, the importance we assign to handling things our loved ones have touched, or to revisiting historic scenes, of epic battles or first dates. To sleeping in Lizzie Borden's bedroom. These are attempts at folding time, at pinning one piece of fabric to another. But time doesn't work that way, you know. That's why you feel so empty afterward.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“After all, one of the great things about books is that they don’t disappear after the first year of their publication—barring floods and thieves, they can loiter forever on your shelves, waiting to be picked up and rediscovered, manic publicity cycle be damned. They can be revisited, loaned out, traded, forgotten and found. They can have strange, long lives.”
― Emily Temple

“Oh, but how could I believe in anything but this? It was right in front of me, and I could touch it.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“Every girl wants more from the world. Every girl wants magic, to transcend the mundanity of her life.”
― Emily Temple

“Now I know that the American Dream can leave you in a coma or even kill you. But of course, we knew that back then too. It wouldn’t have been any fun otherwise.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“I am a person of binges. I have never understood the phrase “too much of a good thing.” Look: it’s irrational, impossible. See fig. 1: when I was a child, I became obsessed with horses. I know, I know, all little girls are obsessed with horses. But I lived for them. I gorged on them. I begged for them in any incarnation: films, toys, patterns, photographs, posters. Once, I cut the hair off a Barbie and superglued it to the base of my spine. I thrilled to wear my pony tail under my clothes, in secret, my parents knowing nothing, thinking me merely human, but it rubbed off after two days, leaving long blond doll hairs clotting in the corners of the house. My birthday came, and my parents, who were still together then, splurged on an afternoon of horseback riding lessons. When it was time to leave, they found that I had knotted my hair into the horse’s mane so elaborately that they had to cut me away from it with a pair of rusted barn shears. I still have the clump of matted girl-and-horse hair hidden in a drawer, though after all the times I put it in my mouth, I admit that it is somewhat the worse for wear.”
― Emily Temple

“Studies have shown that the act of looking at something attractive - a person, a product, some honest-to-goodness nature - triggers an involuntary series of synapse firings in the motor cerebellum. As it turns out, this is the exact same neural sequence that causes us to reach out a hand. Beauty, then, literally moves us. We all know this: beauty can easily force a hand. But will we ever shake the pressing delusion, as Tolstoy put it, that beauty is the same as goodness? After all, how often does goodness truly force a hand? more likely it stays it, and even then, barely, and even then, only for a time.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“Girls, on the other hand, are master idolaters. They are like catholics in that way, or satanists. All gilded shrine and ceremony. All theme and ritual and symbol. They hunger for the gaudy trappings of faith.”
― Emily Temple

“But most of all, I remember space. I remember doing nothing, but doing it together, which made it something after all. Now when I put a dish in the microwave for 30 seconds, I am paralyzed by the discomfort of unorganized time. Is 30 seconds enough to read something, check the weather, pee? I reach for anything to occupy me. But now I've spent all of my time wondering how I should spend it. And the machine beeps and I have purpose again.”
― Emily Temple

“Caroline had not wanted to go to the party at all. That’s something she will fixate on later. She even refused, once or twice. It was too cold. It was too dark. It was the same party. It was the same people. Their hair: the same. Their stories: the same! There was no reason to go, except the one bad reason, which she did not allow herself to consider. But it didn’t matter what she considered or did not consider, because when Elliot came into the bedroom, he was already wearing his coat, and his gloves, and even the cashmere scarf she had given him that he only wore to parties—and anyway, what were they going to do all night if they didn’t go, what would they talk about together all alone, or would they just watch television again on their shared screen, and then separate to watch more television or worse on their individual screens—so she sighed and put her shoes on. She submitted to the party, as she had always known she would, as she always does, as they all do, every time. This is what they do on nights like these.”
― Emily Temple

“Soil and chocolate. Cinnamon and fern. Pomegranate baseball honeycomb leaf. Who knows what anything smells like. Things only smell like feelings.”
― Emily Temple

“But how can you tell if love is real unless you can see it, carry it, feel the slosh of it against your hip? How can love do anything without a physical place in the world, without a washcloth to sleep under? How do you know anything is yours unless it hurts your back to hold it? This is what Jenny was thinking. This is what Jenny was thinking as Donna kissed her, a soft, sweet kiss, the kind an adult might give to another adult, only better.”
― Emily Temple

“He was performing disinterest admirably”
― Emily Temple

“In my heart of hearts (what an expression, as if your heart has a tiny beating heart within it, and within that one, another, and then yet another, an endless progression burrowing deeper and deeper, beating in unison), I thought there was nothing wrong with her. She was a girl with imagination, our Jenny. I thought she might become a scientist, or a doctor, or a mother. Her brothers were the killers, after all. So when she finally found a real friend, I wasn’t surprised.”
― Emily Temple

“Now I see violence in all that touching. Now I see it as a prophecy. Mine, mine, mine, we said. Your body is a toy, a prop, a proof. Give it here, let me put my hands on it. Let me scratch deep into that first layer, catch flesh underneath my fingernails. The change I make will be irrevocable. The change I make will be a declaration. My spit and sweat will mark you mine. There's nothing casual about it.”
― Emily Temple

“Death was for goldfish and grandmothers, disappearance was for fathers and fortunes. Girls like us would only go on forever.”
― Emily Temple

“The world itself shifted to accommodate each of her intentions”
― Emily Temple

“The moon can easily take on the shape of a girl, given the right circumstances.”
― Emily Temple

“All concepts were impermanent. Empty and without inherent existence. He realized human suffering came from clinging to false ideas, self, happiness, continuity.”
― Emily Temple

“The appeal of levitation was obvious to me. every girl wants more from the world. Every girl wants magic, to transcend the mundanity of her life. Every girl wants power.”
― Emily Temple

“Life feeds on death”
― Emily Temple

“RALPH
When I was a child, my mother read me stories every night before bed, fantastic
stories of noble knights and wizards with blue beards and dragons who lived in
the earth, but she was careful with me. I had one of those imaginations, she said.
Overactive, I guess. Are elves real, Ralph? she’d ask, closing the book and
flattening one hand against its back cover. Are dragons? She’d peer into my eyes
as if my secret belief might swim up in them, visible to her as color or texture. I
knew what to tell her. The hill had told me what to say. I didn’t have to tell the
truth in the yellow house; I had the hill for that. The hill would carve a special seat
out of itself and let me nestle inside there to read and say and believe whatever I
wanted. The hill told me which stories were true, and which were not true. The hill built canopies for me when it rained, fed me water when it was dry. The hill
reached out and tripped the boys who followed me, jeering, after school, and
punished the ones who broke my glasses, or who stole. The hill hid me when my
father was angry, and later, when he became an empty sack, floating from chair
to car to chair to bed to chair to car to chair, the hill chattered away in my ear.
The hill has cared for me, I think. I have cared for the hill. But I am older now, you
know. My parents are gone. There is a girl who works at the ice cream parlor with
me, and when she talks, I can see her lips move.”
― Emily Temple

“Donna touched Jenny’s face with one finger. She kissed her again, harder, but on the cheek. Then she grabbed the jar from Jenny’s arms and ran to the edge of the playground and threw it down into the gravel pit, where it shattered, making a sound even louder than Jenny’s surprised scream, and the hearts were all punctured and slashed on the broken glass and the sharp rocks, and then all the other children gathered around and cheered and lifted Donna into the air. They threw her once, and then again, and then once more, although they were tired, because even they knew that some things just had to be done three times. From the air, Donna watched Jenny cry, and then watched her run, and then missed her, as she would for a long time. As for the hearts, they just lay around, a pile of bleeding, empty sacks, until night fell and the other animals came out and, stepping carefully around the glass, dragged them all away.”
― Emily Temple

“A Clean Egg
She is washing eggs at the kitchen sink when she feels it. It feels like a little pulse between her palms. She looks down at the egg she is holding, which has a large green smear across it. Eggs must be washed carefully. Eggs come out of their chickens covered in slime, and then they roll around in their nests and always wind up covered in chicken shit before she can come out to collect them, so the washing is important. She has a special brush for washing eggs. She’s using it now, against this smear, when she feels the pulse again. She sets down the brush. There is something moving inside the egg.

It is not, of course, a baby chicken. She has no rooster, and so all of the eggs her chickens lay are merely eggs, unfertilized. They were never going to be baby chickens. It is not even a tragedy. Besides, the thing moving inside the egg does not feel to her like a chick. Don’t ask her how she knows that. She cups the egg in two hands. It is warm, and whatever is inside is tapping at the curved walls rhythmically, steadily, like the egg is not an egg but a heart, or a room.

Could it be a little naked fairy, like the ones in the pictures her aging aunts send her, the ones they seem to think she’d like to hang on her clean walls? Could it be something more extravagant, like a little giraffe, its neck all curled up inside the egg like a fiddlehead, or a miniature tiger with wet fur and sharp, tiny claws? Could it be the other thing, the thing she has been waiting for, alone in this white house, with her chickens and her one goat and her resistance to the society of others?

A crack appears in the smooth white wall of the egg. The thing inside is trying to get out. She will, in a moment or two, finally find out what it is, how many legs, what it looks like, if it looks like her, if it looks like him.

The crack becomes a dark slice. The slice becomes a dark hole. She closes her eyes. She tips her hands apart. She stomps the egg into the carpet.”
― Emily Temple

“I would have worshipped this: their flagrant, defiant belonging to one another. I worship it a little even now.”
― Emily Temple

“She is the ultimate compassionate warrior. But the most important thing she protects you from is fear of fear. When you call on Tara, you're asking to be freed of the delusions that keep you from seeing the world as it is.”
― Emily Temple

“Meditation is not religion, nor it is relaxation. It is preparation.”
― Emily Temple