Kim van Alkemade > Quotes

“I was so used to pretending to be something I wasn't, it shocked me to be seen for what I was.”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“If good only came to those who deserved it, the world would be a bleak place. In”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“Sometimes I ask myself if there’s any limit to the harm people can do to each other.” “No,”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“What makes you think I ever got married? Married women work themselves to death, all their money goes to husbands who gamble it away. Why would I ever do that to myself?”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“Rachel had been worried she couldn't remember what Sam looked like; now she worried he wouldn't recognize her.”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“Neither had to say that any child would choose a family of their own, no matter how shattered, over the rigors and routines of the Home.”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“Be that as it may, I have been noticing a statistically significant correlation between excessive childhood exposure to radiation and cancers later in life.”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“What life she had left could be measured in hours. Small recompense though they were, they belonged to me now. I had only to claim them.”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“So, he explained, yellow was love, green was a peaceful, calm feeling, and brown was sad, like when his little dog died. He said gray was anxious, so before an exam at school everything seemed blanketed in a dreary fog. Black and white meant nothing special to him, but blue—he said blue was full of hope,”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“Supongo que cualquiera que está solo en el mundo es un huérfano”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“radiograph lets me see what’s inside you.”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“Built on the insubstantial foundation of our feelings, the life we had created together seemed a figment of our imaginations that dissolved into fairy dust in the face of something real, and deadly, like cancer.”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“Wasn’t it Pieter Stuyvesant who said that first boatload of Jews could stay in New Amsterdam only as long as they took care of their own and asked for nothing? So take care of ourselves we did. They always told us how lucky we were to grow up in the Orphaned Hebrews Home, schooling us in its illustrious history. Didn’t we weather the blizzard of 1888, kept warm by our own stockpile of coal, fed from the ovens of our own bakery? And while children all over the city succumbed to cholera at the turn of the century, didn’t we emerge unscathed, the city’s water filtered before it reached our lips? After the Great War, people fell to influenza by the tens of thousands, but in the Home not a single child died. No matter how impressive, though, our Home was a kind of ghetto, the scrape of metal as the gates swung shut the same sound in Manhattan as in Venice. I”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“Free love, it seemed, was only free for the man. It was the woman who was left to pay the price.”
― Kim van Alkemade, Bachelor Girl

“Who am I to judge, as long as you’re happy.”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan #8

“He walked across the room and flicked a switch. A spotlight turned on, illuminating a laminated poster of a woman on his wall. He took a crayon from his pocket and began drawing on it. I could see smudges from past demonstrations. [. . .] His dashed lines crisscrossed the woman's chest as if he were planning a military maneuver on undulating terrain.”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“stare. I guess I needed some distraction—I even”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“You think everything is my fault. Women have breast cancer all the time. So maybe you have cancer, that’s terrible, sure. But what about me? It was probably giving all those X-rays that put this cancer in my bones. I’m not sorry about that, how could I be? It’s a waste of time, regretting the past. Besides, you don’t know for sure.” “Even”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“And oh, what a hungry heart mine was.”
― Kim van Alkemade, Bachelor Girl

“I'd known that I was lonely, but until that moment, I hadn't realized how much room there was in my life for a friend.”
― Kim van Alkemade, Bachelor Girl

“braid,”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan #8

“that a brick facade was as likely to encompass unused ballrooms as cramped apartments.”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“But how could I be homesick for a man I'd only known for a few hours? It didn't make sense. Still, I clutched the sheets to my face and breathed him in.”
― Kim van Alkemade, Bachelor Girl

“profligate to pour all of her earnings into an expensive custom-made”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight