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I Quotes

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All I Quotes

“I don’t know how to ask this,” Everett began. “You and Mr. Bradley…you’re not…” He gestured helplessly with his left hand. “I mean, there’s not, uh, something…is there?” After a bewildered moment Ellen’s eyes widened. “Oh, no! Not—not at all.” Everett’s breath hitched. “I thought—I thought perhaps there was. That’s why I hesitated…but if there isn’t…then I got the right color.” He studied his crimson bouquet, spinning it slowly in a mesmerizing circle. Ellen gulped. Everett looked up, walked forward, and glanced down at his roses, then held them out to her and recaptured her gaze. “I remember you said you liked roses. I think you said white roses, but they don’t have the right meaning.” He smiled sheepishly. Ellen’s eyes dropped. She reached out a shaky hand and clasped the firm, cool, de-thorned stems. “You…do understand me then?” he asked. “Perfectly.” Ellen burst into tears.”

“I don’t know how to exist without him,” I admit truthfully. “He has always been a part of me, and trying to survive without him is slowly chipping away at my soul, yet the hurt still exists, refusing to go away. It devastated me, Liv, and it turns my stomach every time I think of it, yet the images won’t go away. They are as sharp in my mind as if I was an actual fly on the wall. If there was a defining moment, that was definitely it.”

“I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me. I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite space … in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool. And I, myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one.”

“I don't know how to fix my marriage. All I know is that I need ot tear down my own walls and face what's underneath. I cannot save my marriage but I can save myself. I can do that for me and for my children and for every relationship Ihave now and for everyone that comes in the future. I can do that so when I make the most important deision of my life, whether to stay with Craig or to leave him, I'll know that it's my strongest, healthiest self doing the deciding.”

“I don't know how to say i love you in a way i can write.... So let me speak... I do not know when admiration turned into devotion, or when devotion became something that lives in my bloodstream, but here I am. Loving you feels like standing at the edge of something endless and deciding to jump without fear. It feels like laughter that refuses to stop, like breath that comes faster for no reason except your name passing through my mind. You have no idea what you have done to me”

“I don't know how to speak anymore. And with whom? I never found a soulmate. No one was a dream. They left me with open dreams, with my central wound wide open, with my heart torn. I mourn myself; this is my right. And yet I look down on those who take no interest in me. My only desire has been. I will not say it. Even I, or especially I, betray myself. Like a nursing boy, my soul has been soothed. I don't know how to speak anymore. I can't speak anymore. I have taken apart, what they never gave me, which was all I had. And it is death again. It closes in on me, it is my only horizon. No one resembles my dream. I have felt love and they mistreated it, yes, me, I who never loved. The deepest love will disappear forever. What can we love that isn't a shadow? The sacred dreams of childhood have already died, and with them, those of nature, which loved me.”

“I don’t know how to swim,” I said as we walked onto the back deck where the pool awaited. “I’ll teach you,” Bailey said, smiling over her shoulder. “First, I need to clean out some of the gunk from the storm.” After scooping up dead leaves and bugs until the pool looked pristine, Bailey jumped into the pool. “There’s a secret to swimming,” she said, giving me a wink. Tossing off my shirt, I didn’t think about how much I hated to go shirtless outside of the cage. I just walked into the water and returned her bright smile. “What’s the secret?” “Friction.” Before I could ask, Bailey slid her wet body against mine. “Lots of friction,” she murmured, grinning wildly. The moment my hands went to her ass, her legs wrapped around my waist. “I feel like I might drown. More friction might be necessary.” When I nibbled at her shoulder, she went soft in my arms. Getting cocky, I tugged at the strap of her bikini with my teeth. “Shit,” she muttered and I knew we had company. Glancing back, I found Kirk watching us while Sawyer gnawed at an ice cream. “Screwing my daughter in the pool,” he said, exhaling cigarette smoke. “I like a man with balls.” Bailey frowned. “We’re not screwing.” To ensure the moment was truly awkward, Bailey slid her hands up and down my chest. Nothing made a guy piss his pants like having his nutty girlfriend feel him up in front of her scary dad. “We’re going out to Longhorn’s for dinner tomorrow night. Brass Balls can come with us.” “Thanks, Pop,” Bailey said, grinning like her hands weren’t on my ass. “We’re grilling and your brothers are here.” Sawyer grinned at me then Bailey. “A man should die with a full stomach.” Snorting at his kid’s comment, Kirk took her hand then walked away. Bailey watched them leave then looked at me. “I was going to fuck you in the pool,” she whispered. “You’re going to get me killed.”

“I don't know how to talk along the surface of things, but I also don't want to unearth the ugly stuff, over and over again, for people who are just passing through my life. It's depleting. Like every time I dole out a kernel of my history to someone who's not going to be a fixture in my life, a piece of me gets carried away, somewhere I can never get it back. You can't untell someone your secrets. You can't unsay those delicate truths once you learn you can't trust the person you handed them to.”

“I don't know how to walk away from love. Even the kind that hurts. Even the kind that barely sees me. If someone loves me, even a little, I will turn it into a reason to stay. I will hold on too tightly. I will soften every wound. I will rewrite every red flag as a test of my patience. Because I've always believed that love was the prize. That being loved, even poorly, was still something sacred. So I settle. Not because I don't know better, but because I still think love will save me. And maybe that's the saddest part. Not the settling, but the fact that I keep calling it home.”

“I don’t know how you carry an ancient knowing or why you smell like dense stars and church. Everything is human nature yet you are supernovas piercing night’s heart with your wounds of light. I don’t know when you learned to dance with God or why you paused to witness me. Everything is eventual pain yet you are time suspended and blessings constellating. I don’t know why it had to be so or why it couldn’t be anything else. Every thing is an unbearable burden yet here you are —my universe’s Amen.”

“I don't know how you hear music. I imagine that if you like music at all then it has, in your head, some kind of third dimension to it, a dimension suggesting space as well as surface, depth of field as well as texture. Speaking for myself, I used to hear "buildings"... three-dimensional forms of architectural substance and tension. I did not "see" these buildings in the classic synaesthetic way so much as sense them. These forms had "floors", "walls", "roofs", "windows", "cellars". They expressed volume. Music to me has always been a handsome three-dimensional container, a vessel, as real in its way as a Scout hut or a cathedral or a ship, with an inside and an outside and subdivided internal spaces. I'm absolutely certain that this "architecture" had everything to do with why music has always exerted such a hold over me. I think music was the structure in which I learned to contain and then examine emotion.”