Maile Meloy > Quotes

“To be a kid is to be invisible and to listen, and to interpret things that aren't necessarily meant for you to hear--because how else do you find out about the world?”
― Maile Meloy, The Apothecary

“She craved a family, not having had enough of one to understand what a pain in the ass it was.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“His heart felt dangerously full, for the first time in years. That dried-up battered organ, suddenly flush with love. It could kill him.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“The force with which he wanted it both ways made him grit his teeth. What kind of fool wanted it only one way?”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“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.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“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 it was the last question I wanted to answer. But it was impossible, suddenly, to tell a lie.

Benjamin took a deep sniff over the steam and turned to me. 'All right,' he said. 'So who do you fancy?'

I hesitated. 'Fancy means like, right?' I said stalling.

'Of course.'

I gritted my teeth against the answer coming out. but I couldn't stop myself. 'You,' I said helplessly.”
― Maile Meloy, The Apothecary

“I guess if everyone was blind, and you tried to describe vision to them, it would sound crazy and made up.”
― Maile Meloy, The Apprentices

“Whenever we tamper with natural laws, there are consequences,” the count said. “The larger the disruption, the larger the consequence.”
― Maile Meloy, The Apothecary

“At the simplicity of the gesture, he felt a pang: the raw nerve of his loneliness exposed.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“He who delays the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out.”
― Maile Meloy, The Apothecary

“Children were experiments, and his had failed.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“Diabetes is passed that way -- over and down, like a knight in chess.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“I baptize you in the name of the conservation of energy. What comes around goes around.”
― Maile Meloy

“We're creating little hedonists,' Frank used to say. 'Nothing will be as pleasurable as this for the rest of their lives. They'll search everywhere for something that can measure up, and nothing will.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“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.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“All the while, Everett felt both the threat of disorder and the steady, thrumming promise of having everything he wanted, all at once.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“When they started to drain a swamp where birds and fish had lived, for a new housing development down the road from his apartment, Steven watched the protests and the preparations with interest. The bird people were furious, the developers unmovable, and Steven was filled with relief that the fight wasn't his. Nothing here was his... He thought there should have been something sad about how little he was tied up with the place, but instead it felt like freedom. He was free because it wasn't his water here, and they weren't his fish.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“He held his hands tightly together and cursed his daughter for bringing the terrible world, with its humiliation and longing, back to his door.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“At the top of her chalkboard was a quotation from the philosopher Edmund Burke: Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”
― Maile Meloy, The Apprentices

“Civilization, her mother had told her since she was small, was a series of agreements about what was good for everyone, enforced by law. And civilization was only a thin veneer over the savagery and greed that were the human default.”
― Maile Meloy, Do Not Become Alarmed

“Chet suddenly wished she had quit teaching the class because of him, that he’d had any effect on her at all.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“What has mattered, always, is that they're together, and everything else falls away.”
― Maile Meloy

“One aspect of human resilience, in all its marvelousness, was the ability to recalibrate, to adjust to new circumstances with astonishing speed.”
― Maile Meloy, Do Not Become Alarmed

“Maybe we made her feel safe,' Aaron said. 'So she can be brave.”
― Maile Meloy

“There's a look little girls have who are adored by their fathers," Bea said. "It's that facial expression of being totally impervious to the badness of the world. If they can keep that look into their twenties, they're pretty much okay, they've got a force field around them. I don't know if Jonna ever had it. I think she's always known about the bad things.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“Yvette had never talked about her marriage - she was a smart girl, and she knew you had no right to complain about someone you got all the way to the altar with. You made that choice, even if you were a child when you did it, and the marriage vow was sacred.”
― Maile Meloy

“you—die?”
― Maile Meloy, The After-Room

“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, listed below. Thou shalt not steal unless thou art near death with hunger fighting in a just cause, or hath a family to support, or if perhaps an irresistible opportunity to get rich presenteth itself.”
― Maile Meloy, The After-Room

“Our work is an ongoing struggle with unintended consequences. We must try to narrow the gap, which is sometimes a gulf, between what we intend and the results we achieve.”
― Maile Meloy

“Benjamin called it “estro-lock,” the way the two women could talk for hours and lose track of time. They ended up in conversation across any table, screening out noise from kids and men. They could talk about shallow things without judgment and deep things without self-consciousness.”
― Maile Meloy, Do Not Become Alarmed