“Jenny remembers what it was like, all those years ago. It was never dolls for her, nothing so tangible as that. It was more of a feeling. As if, for the first several years of her life, everything held over her a sort of knowledge and insistence. Fence posts, wallpaper, the lawn at certain hours of the day. These things glowered at her, or smiled. Even something as ordinary as the blue rolling chair in her father's office had some hold on her, some whisper of a new dimension in its puffs of dust sent upward by her fists against its cushions. There was an intensity inherent in everything until, one day, there wasn't. The blue chair rolled on its wheels to the window when she pushed it. The rising dust was rising dust. And when it was gone, there was only a knot of longing somewhere deep inside of her, a vacant ache: adolescence. Boredom. It's why we fall in love, Jenny will tell June. We fall in love to get back to that dimension, that wonder. She goes to the laundry room, where, from a pile of clean clothes, she picks out a few articles of June's, folds them, then goes upstairs to knock on her daughter's door and tell her that this, this lost doll world, is the reason there is love.” LoveGrowing UpChildhoodFalling In LoveAdolescence Book:Idaho Source: Idaho
“Whether the judge all those years ago agreed that Jenny had no right to what she wished, or whether her plainspoken grief, which she shouted out in silence from her eyes, moved him, or disturbed him, or confused him, doesn't matter. He whispered, 'Life.' And so she lived. Is living still. Will go on living, to the end of that whisper.” LossGriefRegretMotherhood Author:Emily Ruskovich
“sibling laughter–he can hear it– not the laughter of school friends or neighbors or cousins. Something secret in that laughter, private, edged with meanness and devotion” IdahoEmily Ruskovich Book:Idaho Source: Idaho
“Take you picture off the wall And carry it away Dye your hair the shades of fall Don't let time turn it to gray Don't think of me, I'll be all right Seems I've always done okay Just give me one more kiss good night For the last time, turn away” IdahoEmily Ruskovich Book:Idaho Source: Idaho
“He sings so softly. Almost a whisper. Not like her father at all. Like the voices they give to the dolls, the men.” IdahoEmily Ruskovich Book:Idaho Source: Idaho
“There was a coldness in his unwavering ease, his constant and impersonal joy.” IdahoEmily Ruskovich Book:Idaho Source: Idaho
“She feels in fact that Wade's death is the very end of her heart. It is strange to arrive here at the end after all this time, and also strange to realize she hasn't been here before.” IdahoEmily Ruskovich Book:Idaho Source: Idaho
“Take your picture off the wall So I won't have to see your eyes And maybe soon I won't recall The painful things that once were nice” IdahoEmily Ruskovich Author:Emily Ruskovich