THE GIRL WITH A FIRE TATTOO

“I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of peoples eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.”

“You were unsure which pain is worse — the shock of what happened or the ache for what never will.”

“What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.”

“Sylvia Plath’s favorite color was red. When Ted Hughes left her for another woman, Plath installed a red rug under her writing desk. But she also loved red’s opposite, blue — and other polarizations. Upon Ted’s abandonment, she wrote to her mother: It’s as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative — which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it. I am now flooded with despair, almost hysteria, as if I were smothering. As if a great owl were sitting on my chest, its talons clenching and constricting my heart. Plath’s duality — as a happy-go-lucky American girl and a deeply depressed, deathly ambitious writer — stirs up the darker parts of her audience. We either revile Plath for her cowardice or we celebrate her for her bravery. It depends on whether you look and see blue or red.”

“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime.”

“People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.”

“What’s the world’s greatest lie?… It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.”