John Thorndike > Quotes

“The sixties - most of which took place in the seventies...”
― John Thorndike, The Last of His Mind: A Year in the Shadow of Alzheimer’s

“I haven’t kept a diary since I was thirteen. I stopped then because no matter where I hid the book, my sisters were going to find it, and it was full of the feelings I wasn’t supposed to have. We all knew what we weren’t supposed to feel. Even my sisters were starting to know. But today I’m not so sure. Are any feelings wrong? Was it wrong to feel what I did for Rich Villamano, or just wrong to act on it?”
― John Thorndike, The World Against Her Skin: A Son's Novel

“She’s never been good at meditation, at just sitting. It’s what she likes about her drugs, that they let her drift in slow motion. But she can’t do that any more. Now she can only use her mind to soothe her mind. Quietly she repeats, Om mani padme hum ten times, but it doesn’t help. Of course not, because she’s still in withdrawal.
She wants to be alone in her small, lovely, decrepit wooden house in Sag Harbor. But the house also scares her. It’s filled with drugs and alcohol.”
― John Thorndike, The World Against Her Skin: A Son's Novel

“What is it with humans, anyway? Fish never swell with age, and seagulls don’t get pudgy. They flare with timeworn grace and settle on the sand, then strut around the more bizarre species, Homo sapiens. Maybe terns notice when one of their kind grows stiff, when it can no longer scoot across the sand and lift into the air in a tenth of a second. But if there are birds impaired by aging, Ginny has never seen one.”
― John Thorndike, The Passionate Sister

“Jamie slides his chair closer to Miles and puts an arm around his shoulder. The two of them sit side by side, their eyes down and their heads touching. Ginny watches them, looks away, tries not to stare. She thinks about Joe. Did the two of them ever, at a table or in bed or watching a sunset, sit or stand beside each other with their heads lightly touching? For ten seconds? For two? That wasn’t Joe’s way. She wonders how her children ever learned to do this. From the bohemians and hippies, she thinks again. And from the gays, coming out of the closet.”
― John Thorndike, The World Against Her Skin: A Son's Novel

“Floating along on her nostalgia is now her only intoxicant. Again she strokes her breasts and the inside of her thighs, and feels not the least quiver. Carol was right, she was always the passionate sister—but not anymore. Can she really be done with men? Sexually they could be blocks of wood.”
― John Thorndike, The Passionate Sister

“This mythic leader of the Revolution, she thought—how much like other men he was. How easily offended, how easily calmed.”
― John Thorndike, King Robin

“Buena en la cama,” he had heard men say about women: how good they were in bed. It was a phrase that came with a knowing look but never any details. You were supposed to understand, but he didn’t. The peasant girl he told Clare about had done nothing but lie in silence beneath him. Good in bed meant wild, he thought. It meant that the woman had no inhibitions—and that was Clare. He loved this but it scared him.”
― John Thorndike, King Robin

“Now she felt good. She felt great. She loved her swelling body, loved how everyone gave way before her, paid her tribute, wanted to touch her arm or shoulder. In the mirror, her face glowed. Her days of nausea were forgotten. Pregnancy was easy, it was a breeze on a summer day.”
― John Thorndike, King Robin

“There’s a gift to looking after Miles. Ginny’s despair, her doubts and indecision have all lifted. Maybe they’re hovering and will descend upon her later, but for now only one thing matters, that Miles is dying. The rest of the world runs on. Patty Hearst has been kidnapped and the war continues in Vietnam, but in this quiet house there are no quarrels. The moon and stars pass overhead, waves tumble onto the beach and Miles keeps breathing.”
― John Thorndike, The Passionate Sister

“She should have filched a few Nembutals before Rob flushed them all down the toilet. Then she wouldn’t have to lie here awake at midnight listening to the hollies rub against her bedroom window, pushed by a night breeze off the bay. She lies under a blanket and another of her quilts, the room smelling faintly of vomit and Glade. At Silver Hill people often talked about these first nights back, and the inevitable craving. She hates that word, craving. She doesn’t crave a drink, she just wants one.”
― John Thorndike, The Passionate Sister

“Buena en la cama,” he had heard men say about women: how good they were in bed. It was a phrase that came with a knowing look but never any details. You were supposed to understand, but he didn’t. The peasant girl he told Clare about had done nothing but lie in silence beneath him. Good in bed meant wild, he thought. It meant that the woman had no inhibitions—and that was Clare. He loved this but it scared him.”
― John Thorndike, A Hundred Fires in Cuba

“She has to leave. She has nowhere to go. She imagines tying Rich to a chair, his hands and feet bound and his neck roped. No food, no water, no escape until he tells her everything he’s felt about her for the last four years, the whole truth until she believes him. If he talks and she knows he’s lying, she’ll wrap another coil around his neck, each one tighter than the last. Finally he’ll break down and tell her the bitter truth—that he never loved her at all, that it was only their play that excited him.”
― John Thorndike, The World Against Her Skin

“It’s not drinking that’s strange, it’s sex, because no one can talk about it. Unlike when she was growing up, people now discuss menopause and cancer and death—but sex is still taboo, for her and everyone else. When has she ever talked about her sex with Joe, her sex with Isamu or Rich or Alberto? She steers herself away from even thinking about sex between Jamie and Miles, or sex among the Six. It’s true these days that people are more at ease with their bodies. They talk easily about their heart rate and digestion and the state of their evacuations. But about sex they’re never graphic, and she will be no different. She doesn’t want to spook her sons.”
― John Thorndike, The World Against Her Skin: A Son's Novel

“After a quick dinner she picks up Durrell’s Justine and reads the first chapters again. She’s read the novel several times, and never tires of it. She’s drawn to characters in books, to their dramatic lives and desires. And no wonder. People in novels don’t spend time paying bills or washing dishes, or god forbid pissing or taking a shit. Day after day, no one in a novel ever uses the toilet. They’re too wrapped up with one vital encounter after the next.”
― John Thorndike, The Passionate Sister

“After breakfast they go for a walk, down to Higgs Beach and out to the pier, then along the shore. They’ve ambled like this since Jamie was two, on Connecticut, Cape Cod and Long Island seashores. Ginny holds hands with Lyle, to include him as she reminisces about her boys rowing their dinghies back and forth in front of the Cantipauk house, about eels in the eel grass, gobby-gunk seaweed fights and walks on the mudflats, a pathless world that appeared and vanished twice a day. There the tide ruled their lives in summer, with fiddler crabs and herons in the marsh, strutting gulls on the cobbled shore and halyards clacking on windy nights. On Cape Cod the fogs were so thick that bodies disappeared only thirty feet away. On Long Island the long blue beach stretched all the way to Montauk. The ocean here evokes the oceans there.”
― John Thorndike, The Passionate Sister

“She needs something new, or at least to want something new. The trouble is, she can’t figure out what. She has a goal, which is not to drink. But hoping not to do something is hardly a desire. When she drank she didn’t care about the future. Alcohol and pills did away with all that. They softened her, they lowered her onto a deep cushion.”
― John Thorndike, The Passionate Sister