Kali Wallace > Quotes

“It was too lonely to be heaven, and there wouldn't be stars in hell.”
― Kali Wallace, Shallow Graves

“The first rule of cannibal mermaid fight club is don't talk about cannibal mermaid fight club.”
― Kali Wallace, Shallow Graves

“Oh my god,” I said, but I couldn’t help but laugh. “You can’t make jokes about eating dead people if you actually eat dead people.”
― Kali Wallace, Shallow Graves

“I was holding his wrists, but it wasn’t his flesh and bone I was feeling. It was the sick slippery guilt inside the meat shell.”
― Kali Wallace, Shallow Graves

“A memory was a thing with no shape, no mass, but an indescribable weight.”
― Kali Wallace, The Memory Trees

“She was carrying with her, the cold. She was holding on to that icy stone of grief. It had been there all along, sitting high in her chest, and with every step another fissure split through its middle-shivering over the orchard, frosting and melting, seasons flickering around her with the rhythm of her breaths, with the beat of her heart, she and the trees and the earth all part of the same creature.”
― Kali Wallace, The Memory Trees

“People who lived under constant surveillance either forgot or stopped caring that they were being watched at all times.”
― Kali Wallace, Dead Space

“A memory was a thing with no shape, no mass, but indescribable weight.
The Memory Trees”
― Kali Wallace

“When a person dies there are seconds when the heart still squeezes, not yet knowing it is time to stop. Human bodies are messy, imperfect things, a tangle of crossed signals and incomplete messages.”
― Kali Wallace, Salvation Day

“The day we believe ourselves immune from the cruelties and atrocities of the past is the day we commit them again.”
― Kali Wallace, Salvation Day

“She believed she understood something nobody else was smart enough to grasp, but all she could see was her own desires, distorted and reflected back to her, in everyone she met.”
― Kali Wallace, Dead Space

“I knew what it felt like to turn toward the stars because it was easier to gaze into unknowable darkness than to look at the painful wreckage of the life that surrounds you. I knew what it meant to take the knot of hopes and hurts and fears from inside and hurl it into deep space, across voids and galaxies, through dust and light.”
― Kali Wallace, Salvation Day

“I’m going to say they should learn from what Zahra said about what her father believed.”
“The world not as it is,” Aunt Padmavati said quietly, “but as it is meant to be.”
― Kali Wallace, Salvation Day

“I had never been able to explain how it felt to be an empty shell of memory where a son ought to be.”
― Kali Wallace, Salvation Day

“She had wept until she was scrapped raw inside, empty but for the leaden weight of every memory of the life she had left, the grasping thorns of every choice that had brought her to this bleak and howling place. When darkness fell she poured rivers of tears into the wood and soul and stone beneath her, a well of loneliness that felt as though it would never run dry.”
― Kali Wallace, The Memory Trees

“Seasons turned, apple blossoms blushed and withered, fruit swelled and dropped, snow fell and melted, and children grew to bear children of their own, to make mistakes of their own, to love and hate and fear on their own, to die by hunger, by volence, by the lure of the wider world. Promises were made, hearts were broken, and people twisted themselves around and around and around, the soft green tendrils of their dreams hardening into woody vines that could not bend but would some day break.”
― Kali Wallace, The Memory Trees

“For fuck’s sake, having a conversation with her was like chasing a narcissistic butterfly through a shit-filled meadow.”
― Kali Wallace, Dead Space

“We always had a choice. It was just that the companies we worked for were very good at making sure all of our choices were bad ones.”
― Kali Wallace, Dead Space

“How insidiously easy it was to convince oneself that the burden of proving one’s humanity rested entirely on the shoulders of those in need of help, and not on those who could help but chose not to.”
― Kali Wallace, Salvation Day

“The universe was larger now, and more terrifying, but the same mistakes lingered, and the same truths remained. Everything built by human hands could be destroyed. Everything dreamed by human minds could be preserved.”
― Kali Wallace, Salvation Day

“I was never given a choice, I wanted to say, but I couldn't bring myself to speak the words aloud. It was true, and it was a comforting lie. We always had a choice. It was just that the companies we worked for were very good at making sure all of our choices were bad ones.”
― Kali Wallace, Dead Space

“Knowing an ugly truth and having the power to fight it are two very different things.”
― Kali Wallace, Dead Space

“Mrs. Roche carried everything she was thinking in the climbing arches of her drawn-on eyebrows, and they climbed extra high, with more than the usual amount of arch, when she was disapproving of Sorrow's family.”
― Kali Wallace, The Memory Trees