Sarah Bruni > Quotes

“There are always entire worlds that exist alongside the one you think you’ve chosen to live in. Sometimes you chose the worlds, and sometimes they chose you.”
― Sarah Bruni, The Night Gwen Stacy Died: A Fiercely Smart Literary Coming of Age Drama for Women About First Love, Loss, and Identity

“She wanted to lunge for him then. In that moment Sheila wanted to charge her whole self into his body, pull out a tibia or a femur and squeeze its proteins to dust. She felt like she had more strength concentrated in every muscle than she'd ever had in her life, and her joints were shifting around inside of her , her cells were multiplying, like the real living organism she supposed she had been all long, but also - and this was the strange thing - she felt helpless, she felt drained of every available energy, like all of this velocity building in her was a product of what he had given her and what she had done with it. She remembered Mr. Zorn, her sophomore-year physics teacher, stepping back from the chalkboard in admiration of an equation he had just written, saying how beautiful it was, how perfectly and essentially balanced, and Sheila had rolled her eyes sitting at her desk at how pathetic this had sounded, how devoid of beauty Mr. Zorn's life must have truly been for him to even think to say something so insane, but now she felt the weight of this truth sting in her somewhere. She and Peter had built this, they had built it together - that's where the velocity came from, that's where the force of the thing came from - and to remove one of the variables from the equation was to leave it unbalanced, and she was not going to let this happen.”
― Sarah Bruni, The Night Gwen Stacy Died: A Fiercely Smart Literary Coming of Age Drama for Women About First Love, Loss, and Identity

“There was no way to compare the feeling of being forgiven to anything else in this world.”
― Sarah Bruni, The Night Gwen Stacy Died: A Novel

“In the middle of the night, it was always the same. The dreams told the dreamer, pay attention. The dreams told the dreamer, consider this and consider that, and for the most part, it was fine to consider these things, to engage the subconscious in the exercise of willful consideration.

Always the dreams told the dreamer, Let’s pretend the world is this way for a few minutes, I mean, no big deal, no commitment, just something to do until you wake up.

Come on, say the dreams, it’ll be fun.”
― Sarah Bruni, The Night Gwen Stacy Died: A Fiercely Smart Literary Coming of Age Drama for Women About First Love, Loss, and Identity

“But when you understood things like that, like the plain fact that everyone was, by living in a body, completely alone—entering the world that way, leaving it that way—it made sense that it took little effort to know how to react to the will of another living thing.”
― Sarah Bruni, The Night Gwen Stacy Died: A Novel

“There was always dirt under his fingernails when he rested his hands on the counter, and his hands were broad and calloused, like maybe they served him in a particular way that had nothing to do with gesticulation or the exchange of money... It seemed a fine way to pass the time to imagine that the dirt under his fingernails was residue from saving the world.”
― Sarah Bruni, The Night Gwen Stacy Died: A Fiercely Smart Literary Coming of Age Drama for Women About First Love, Loss, and Identity

“He wanted to be free of so many obligations, and he’d gotten what he wanted. He was free. It was a terrible feeling.”
― Sarah Bruni, The Night Gwen Stacy Died: A Fiercely Smart Literary Coming of Age Drama for Women About First Love, Loss, and Identity

“Just because you knew the cause of something didn’t mean your body would learn how not to process this, how to sensibly react. The brain could know something to be harmless, but the body could not deny that the ground shook. The body knew better. Or, the body was gullible.”
― Sarah Bruni, The Night Gwen Stacy Died: A Fiercely Smart Literary Coming of Age Drama for Women About First Love, Loss, and Identity