CRCarol Rifka Brunt

30 collected words

Carol Rifka Brunt

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn’t have. Maybe there’s a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. Waiting to make me feel the same impossibility over and over again.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

02Undated

Nothing had changed. I was the stupid one again. I was the girl who never understood who she was to people.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

03Undated

I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

04Undated

You know, Junie, you're fourteen now. I think you can certainly manage to put together a sandwich. ...The thing is, if my mother had any idea what I had in my backpack, she would have made me that sandwich. If she knew that I'd searched and searched the house until I finally found the little key to the fireproof box buried in the bottom of her underwear drawer, if she knew that I'd unlocked the box and taken my passport out, that I had it with me right that very second in a Ziploc bag in the bottom of my backpack, if she knew why I had it there, if she knew even a bit of all that, she might have made me that PBJ. She wouldn't have said, "You're fourteen now," like she thought I was some kind of responsible adult. No. If she knew about my plan, she would have said, "you're only fourteen." She would have told me that I was crazy to think about going to England with I was only fourteen.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

05Undated

That's the difference between you and Greta. She has better things to do. She gets involved in clubs, activities. She has friends. But you? You slump around in that room of yours--

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

06Undated

I used to think maybe I wanted to become a falconer, and now I'm sure of it, because I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

07Undated

You could try to believe what you wanted, but it never worked. Your brain and your heart decided what you were going to believe and that was that. Whether you liked it or not.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

08Undated

I like the word clandestine. It feels medieval. Sometimes I think of words as being alive. If clandestine were alive, it would be a pale little girl with hair the color of fall leaves and a dress as white as the moon.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

09Undated

It's the most unhappy people who want to stay alive, because they think they haven't done everything they want to do. They think they haven't had enough time. They feel they've been shortchanged.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

10Undated

I suppose I'm in that very small group of people who are not waiting for their own story to unfold. If my life was a film, I'd have walked out by now.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

11Undated

But you don't know what it was like. It was just the two of us that afternoon, and then . . . and then it was just me.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

12Undated

When people mentioned it to me, they thought they were talking about some casual relative of mine. For most people that's what an uncle was. They had no idea how I felt about Finn. No idea that hearing them talk about AIDS, like that was the important part of the story--more important than who Finn was, or how much I loved him, or how much he was still breaking my heart every single hour of every single day--made me want to scream.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

13Undated

If you close your eyes when you sing in Latin, and if you stand right at the back so you can keep one hand against the cold stone wall of the church, you can pretend you're in the Middle Ages. That's why I did it. That's what I was in it for.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

14Undated

People didn’t know everything then. There were things people had never seen before. Places nobody had ever been. You could make up a story and people would believe it...also maybe it seems like it would be okay not to be perfect. Nobody was perfect back then. Just about everyone was defective, and most people had no choice except to stay that way.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

15Undated

I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I kept looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

16Undated

...I felt the wall between the world of secrets and the real world start to collapse. I felt the girls from the portrait becoming us and us becoming them...

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

17Undated

There was a flicker of something in Greta's look. I couldn't tell whether it was a flicker of love or regret or meanness.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

18Undated

…there’s just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on. It makes you believe you’re special, even though you know you’re not.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

19Undated

The day my mother gave us the keys, she also made me and Greta sign a form so that the bank knew our signatures. To get in we had to show our key and sign something so they would know it was really us. I was worried that my signature wouldn't look the same. I wasn't sure when that thing would happen that made it so you always signed your name exactly the same, but it hadn't happened to me yet. So far I'd only had to sign something three times. Once for a code of conduct for the eighth grade field trip to Philadelphia, once for a pact I made with Beans and Frances Wykoski in fifth grade that we'd never have boyfriends until high school. (Of the three of us, I'm the only one who kept that pact.)

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

20Undated

Maybe you had to be dying to finally get to do what you wanted.I fidgeted around with the puzzle pieces for a while longer, but I wasn't lucky. Nothing seemed to fit without a whole lot of work.Then I had this thought: What if it was enough to realize that you would die someday, that none of this would go on forever? Would that be enough?

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

21Undated

I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn't like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half the size. . . . I figured that, on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you'd have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

22Undated

Then, who is Matilda?' I asked.Toby tilted his cup and poked at the slush with his straw. 'I suppose Matilda's the girl who felt like home.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

23Undated

I dream about people who don't need to have sex to know they love each other. I dream about people who would only ever kiss you on the cheek.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote

24Undated

But they gave me Finn. He said it like maybe it was worth the trade. Like it was something he would do again if he had the choice. Like he would take a man's legs and give away years of his own freedom if it was the only way. I thought how that was wrong and terrible and beautiful all at the same time.

Carol Rifka Brunt / quote