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Annabel

Book by Lauren Oliver · 6 quotes · Annabel, Annabel Haloway, Comoditate

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Annabel Quotes

“See?” my mother would say, smiling at me and my sister, Carol, in turn. “We live in the greatest country on earth. See how lucky we are?” And yet the ash continued swirling down, and the smells of death came through the windows, crept under the door, hung in our carpets and curtains, and screamed of her lie. Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar? And if you lie to a liar, is the sin somehow negated or reversed? These are the kinds of questions I ask myself now: in these dark, watery hours, when night and day are interchangeable. No. Not true.”

“Why would a white caribou come down to Beaver River, where the woodland herd lives? Why would she leave the Arctic tundra, where the light blazes incandescent, to haunt these shadows? Why would any caribou leave her herd to walk, solitary, thousands of miles? The herd is comfort. The herd is a fabric you can't cut or tear, passing over the land. If you could see the herd from the sky, if you were a falcon or a king eider, it would appear like softly floating gauze over the face of the snow, no more substantial than a cloud. "We are soft," the herd whispers. "We have no top teeth. We do not tear flesh. We do not tear at any part of life. We are gentleness itself. Why would any of us break from the herd? Break, apart, separate, these are hard words. The only reason any of us would become one, and not part of the herd, is if she were lost.”

“I wonder what Lena is doing now. I always wonder what Lena is doing. Rachel, too: both my girls, my beautiful, big-eyed girls. But I worry about Rachel less. Rachel was always harder than Lena, somehow. More defiant, more stubborn, less feeling . Even as a girl, she frightened me—fierce and fiery-eyed, with a temper like my father’s once was. But Lena . . . little darling Lena, with her tangle of dark hair and her flushed, chubby cheeks. She used to rescue spiders from the pavement to keep them from getting squashed; quiet, thoughtful Lena, with the sweetest lisp to break your heart. To break my heart: my wild, uncured, erratic, incomprehensible heart. I wonder whether her front teeth still overlap; whether she still confuses the words pretzel and pencil occasionally; whether the wispy brown hair grew straight and long, or began to curl. I wonder whether she believes the lies they told her.”

“If Conrad remembered the skinny, frightened girl he'd held for one brief moment on a frigid Boston street corner, he showed no signs of it when we met ... Even as I tried to urge hum back against the pillows, he looked at me with wild eyes. "What happened to your leather jacket?" he asked. "Shh," I said, trying to sooth him. "There's no leather jacket." "You were wearing it the first time I saw you," he said, frowning slightly.”