Readergirl ’s Reviews > These Violent Delights > Status Update

"All they were—all
they had ever been—was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other
was the sun."

"All I want to do is make you happy, and you’re the unhappiest person
I’ve ever met.”

"They watched each other’s eyes, rested their foreheads together
as if from opposite sides of a mirror. Their bodies belonged to each other
because they were the same body. They had been just one person, long ago,
but had been cut from one another before they were born."

"There was already the shadow of a transformation inside them. How could
Paul brace himself for the real thing when the transcendence was already
too terrible to bear? It would be like looking at God."

"It should have been more conspicuous, the secret they carried between
them like two children playing at spies. It glowed in their skin, filled their
horizon with colors no one else could see. "

"It was a relief and a horror to be known so
perfectly."

"All he could think about was throwing himself against a wall,
over and over, until he’d smashed himself into shards so fine that the void
inside him could finally slip free."

“Nothing I do is ever going to matter.” The longer he spoke, the lighter
he felt. “Everything I do is so small and so useless. I’m not like you. I don’t
even have a shape of my own to hold anything else in place. The world
would be exactly the same without me—if I disappeared you’d be the same,
as if I’d never been here at all. I’ll never matter the way you do, and you
know it. You don’t need me.”

"There was something unsettling in the way the golden
autumn light moved over his cheekbones, a beauty so fleeting and elusive
that Paul knew he wouldn’t be able to hold it in his memory. "

“Hard to trust you if you’re going to maim me,”- Paul