Maile Meloy Quotes

Diabetes is passed that way -- over and down, like a knight in chess.

They had started one of those wish-fulfillment kids’ adventure books, where the boy hero has exactly the qualities he needs to triumph, at every moment… She’d been bored and annoyed, and at one point...

The force with which he wanted it both ways made him grit his teeth. What kind of fool wanted it only one way?

She craved a family, not having had enough of one to understand what a pain in the ass it was.

But how could you measure your own pain against the pain of the world?

People regressed, around their families, to the age at which they had been angriest.

Children were experiments, and his had failed.

And braking,

At the simplicity of the gesture, he felt a pang: the raw nerve of his loneliness exposed.

Whenever we tamper with natural laws, there are consequences, the count said. The larger the disruption, the larger the consequence.

He who delays the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out.

His heart felt dangerously full, for the first time in years. That dried-up battered organ, suddenly flush with love. It could kill him.

I guess if everyone was blind, and you tried to describe vision to them, it would sound crazy and made up.

We have to think of a question that we wouldn't otherwise want to answer.'He stood over the pot, looking down at the leaves. 'Something like, Who do you fancy?''That might work,' I said, even though i...

One aspect of human resilience, in all its marvelousness, was the ability to recalibrate, to adjust to new circumstances with astonishing speed.

Now, alone on the roof, Valentine looked at her shoes and wished people would either stay or go away, but not constantly coming back and leaving again.

You—die?

He was acting like the man he wanted to be, in hopes that he could become him. He would keep acting until he couldn't stand it anymore, and then he would be the man he was.

Chet suddenly wished she had quit teaching the class because of him, that he’d had any effect on her at all.

But the commandments were absolute. The stone tablets Moses brought down from the mountain had not said Thou shalt not kill except when fighting Nazis, or in self-defense, or in some other situations,...