Emily Habeck Books & Quotes

“Angela's jaw is a branch he can snap in half in his young, strong hands.”

Source: Shark Heart

“Angela had been grieving Marcos almost as long as she'd known him, and finally, like a rainbow against a bruise-hued cloud, she saw the real Marcos—not as an idea, dream, hope, or possibility—but as he really was. Marcos drew an outline of a person who was generous, wise, and kind, and Angela's longing animated his image with life and color. This two-dimensional Marcos, the one she imagined, was never real.”

Grief Heartbreak Infatuation Imagined Selves

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“As a grown man comfortable with his own vulnerability, he inspired his students to enter an uncommon domain, a place where fear, sadness, and rage were worthwhile experiences rather than things to smile through or tuck away.”

Feelings Emotion Masculinity

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“The surface of love was a feeling, but beyond this thin layer, there was a fathomless, winding maze of caverns offering many places to see and explore. Wren used to think romantic passion only grew more intense in the depths.”

Love Romance Passion

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Lewis thought all children came into the world knowing some truth about magic and God. He thought the journey of adulthood was to forget about these things and then partake in the path to remembering. Lewis said one of the purposes of art was to point people toward what they already knew. Now Wren really needed to know: Where is the art here, Lewis? And what path?”

Art Truth Knowing

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Wren could not easily walk away now, because she had lingered past the point of invisibility. Her identity was crystallized to these people, and once she allowed herself to become solid to other human beings, she would be seen. After being seen, Wren risked being known, and being known came with the risk of loss. Even this small interaction cost her too much.”

Fear Loss Risk Loneliness Being Known

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Wren's encouragement both calmed and frightened Lewis. He wished it were Wren who was holding him back.”

Fear

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“I'll read alone for now," Lewis replied, knowing the only thing more terrifying than seeing his future through his own eyes would be seeing it through hers.”

Fear Transformation The Future

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Marcos recognizes Angela's eyes, holding the urgency and fear of a hunted animal right before it gets put out of its misery, before the boom, before it all goes dark.”

Fear Metaphor Vulnerability Animalism

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“As he squeezed, Marcos verbalized Angela's fears as if that were his new art form, peppering her with spiny one-liners she could not unhear.”

Fear Abuse

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Lewis realized he did not fear death but grief, the ache of being alone and mangled by change.”

Death Fear Grief

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Most of all, Lewis wished he could tell his students that they transfigured his lonely ambition into a dream to change the world; how they were all artists of the highest caliber, fulfilling humankind's highest duty and delivering the message: faith lived in the darkest rooms.”

Art Faith Humanity

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“What would happen to his self in the moment of complete metamorphosis? When Lewis, the actor, became a great white shark, the character, permanently? Was Lewis's disease an art form?”

Art Disease Transformation Questions Metamorphosis

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Are we all just actors, performing some unbound art form for God, the audience of space?”

Art God Performance

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“The theater hums with presence as everyone in the audience and cast alike remembers that joy and grief are human birthrights, but mostly, being alive, is everything in between.”

Life Joy Grief Being Alive

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“What a tragedy it is, being a woman. I would rather be a million other things.”

Humanity Womanhood

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“I am a very ill man if you see mutation as my doctors do. But if you perceive mutation in another way, as a transformation, you might see a dramatic form with many possibilities. I am unsure of many things, but I am sure of this: I want to spend my last months as a human being with you, making theater about human beings, for human beings.”

Humanity Transformation

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“After these sightings, Wren caught her mind wandering, wondering what it would be like to be an animal with such uncomplicated, reasonable fears.”

Humanity Animals

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“With her own mind and muscle, she, too, could engage the ever illusory margin between human and animal.”

Humanity Animals

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“(Was personally still a word he could use? Was he still a person?)”

Humanity Metamorphosis

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Wren did not see her mother as a sick woman living within a body she no longer knew or controlled. Instead, she saw a pathetic, powerless beast surrounded by murder, a mess of blood and guts. As rage bubbled up and spilled over, Wren sharpened a pernicious, worded arrow and lobbed it at the bull's-eye, her mother. "You are a monster."”

Humanity Transformation Metamorphosis Animalism

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“We're perfectly fine without things and places. Things and places are how people live, and we are not people." "Well, I disagree.”

Humanity Animalism

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“She missed the evenings most of all: the grapefruit sun hovering above the prairie, dismissing the day with unpredictable strokes of cantaloupe, fuchsia, and violet.”

Home Sunset Oklahoma

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Every creek, spring, grove, hill, and ridge had a story. In these stories, the boundary between the living and dead became thin if not completely transparent. Angela began to understand why people in Julia's family rarely moved away. The family's lives and the land were bound to each other as if they were the same body.”

Home Land Metaphor Boundaries

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“It was not really a dancing song but, rather, the kind of music that made you want to nestle into the arms of someone wonderful and stay there forever. Through the music's swells, they swayed, and they knew, and they held each other, and they knew, and they melted, and they knew, and they knew, and they knew. Everything would be different and difficult soon.”

Love Change Music Dancing

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Later was no longer a dependable place.”

Change Procrastination

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“The doctors focused on subtraction, what was being taken from his human experience, but they failed to see the incredible features and traits being added in the process.”

Change Transformation Metamorphosis

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“While his body rearranged itself, Lewis could do nothing but helplessly bear witness to the process.”

Change Transformation Metamorphosis Body Horror

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“An incessant desire for fish became louder than all the things Lewis treasured: the heartbeat of language, the idea of living in a tree, the universal within the poetic, and his soft way of loving her.”

Change Transformation Hunger Animalism

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“At last, he witnessed Wren, his assiduous, loving partner, see him not for what he was but for what he had become. Lewis's nightmares were now in full bloom. His wife loved him, but she was also terrified of him.”

Change Transformation Nightmares

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“As an only child, Angela nurtured her parents, as if they were static fixtures in the house requiring regular maintenance.”

Care Metaphor Parents Nurturing

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Angela mentally extracts herself from the scene by imagining bits of herself aloft and floating, dandelion seeds in outer space. Here, pain and consequences are in the world beyond her, and the world beyond her is a marble within which she is but a fleck inside a fleck inside a fleck inside a fleck.”

Pain Metaphor Consequences Avoidance

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“How was it that her self's container, her only true protection from the world's elements, had only ever betrayed her, surprised her, and enforced uncertainty and strangeness?”

Self Self Image Body Horror

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“He would say acting is paying homage to the visionaries who had the courage to go for it; acting is freeing the parts of oneself living secretly, ashamedly, in memory and regret; acting is living at the height of one's emotional possibilities; acting is crafting reality in the name of pretend; acting is the one time when no one suffers the consequences of truth.”

Self Truth Acting Personhood

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Lewis watched her flutter away, recalling the last time a woman left him alone in the ocean. Both times he was passive. Both times he felt euphoric and then promptly forlorn.”

Loneliness Regret Abandonment

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Lewis gazed at the moon and then to Wren and once more at the moon and back to Wren, realizing, startlingly, he could not tell the two entities apart.”

Love Romance Beauty Memory The Moon

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“I can't look at everything hard enough,' Lewis whispered into the stars again and again. The combination of words belonged to a character he would never play, but in that moment, he felt that the line had been written for him.”

Stars Belonging

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Beneath this great, glittering dome of stars and shard of new moon, Angela got the feeling, somehow, that she might belong to everything and everything to her.”

Stars Belonging Everything

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Truth and Love were complicated concepts on their own, and patching the two words together created a significant tangle Lewis could not unwind.”

Love Truth True Love

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“When he was with Wren, Lewis played a characterized version of himself, punching up his idealism, sense of humor, and creative energy. He had been an actor, after all.”

Character Lying Acting

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Lewis told Margaret stories about Wren, who at times seemed like a character in a wonderful book, a static entity whose movements, while profound, would always be limited to a finite story.”

Character Profound Story

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Angela wasn't old enough to get a driver's license, buy cigarettes, or vote, but she was the perfect age to worship the first guy who said she was important.”

Worship Infatuation

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“After six weeks of being eight, ten, twelve feet away from Rachel in the classroom, Wren was now less than a foot, and everything, everything, was more beautiful, wonderful, and interesting up close.”

Romance Infatuation Proximity

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Just the thought of him gave her a feeling she had not experienced she she was a tiny girl who believed in Santa, each hour of December passing through a tunnel of strained, anticipatory patience.”

Metaphor Infatuation

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Talking to anyone but him was like trying to speak with a mouthful of molasses, and Angela realized her whole life had been molasses.”

Metaphor Infatuation

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“So, maybe love wasn't an unwieldy accessory in times of peril. Maybe it was the key to survival.”

Love Romance Family

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“Would you like to be a family?" Lewis asked slowly, not because he was unsure but because he had nothing to offer her but his self and his time. "A family?" "Yes." "Like, brother and sister?" asked Margaret. "You and me." "Family," Margaret said again, this time through tears. "I thought it would never happen to me.”

Family

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“She didn't want food at all but rather, the feeling of emotional fullness, a hunger that could only be satiated by home, family, and familiarity.”

Family Emotions Hunger

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“They said the word family back and forth until it lost its meaning and felt like gush in their mouths.”

Family

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

“You're like a brother to me." Lewis felt his fins tingle as a light flickered on in him, his retired boyhood wish for a sibling coming to life. "You're like a sister to me," Lewis echoed, realizing as he said it that few things had ever felt so true.”

Love Family Found Family Sibling Relationships

Book:Shark Heart

Source: Shark Heart

Emily Habeck Books

Shark Heart

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