Marlena Quotes

“Tell me what you can't forget, and I'll tell you who you are. I switch off my apartment light and she comes with the dark.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“I've never believed in the idea of an innocent bystander. The act of watching changes what happens. Just because you don't touch anything doesn't mean you are exempt. You might be tempted to forgive me for being just fifteen, in over my head, for not knowing what to do, for not understanding, yet, the way even the tiniest choices domino, until you're irretrievably grown up, the person you were always going to be. Or in Marlena's case, the person you'll never have a chance to be. The world doesn't care that you're just a girl.

Let the record show that I was smarter than I looked. And anyway, I touched.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“When you grow up, who you were as a teenage either takes on a mythical importance or it's completely laughable. I wanted to be the kind of person who wiped those years away; instead, I feared, they defined me.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“Great loneliness, profound isolation, a cataclysmic, overpowering sense of being misunderstood. When does that kind of deep feeling just stop? Where does it go? At fifteen, the world ended over and over and over again. To be so young is kind of a self-violence. No foresight, an inflated sense of wisdom, and yet you're still responsible for your mistakes. It's a little frightening to remember just how much, and how precisely, I felt. Now, if the world really did end, I think I'd just feel numb.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“Why do they say ghosts are cold? Mine are warm, a breath dampening your cheek, a voice when you thought you were alone.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“Sometimes I wonder how I’d tell this if I didn’t have so many books rattling around inside me. The truth is both a vast wilderness and the tiniest space you can imagine.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“Have you ever tried to demarcate the hours between the moment you thought you'd never fall asleep and the instant after opening your eyes, your bedroom flooded with the befuddling, sugary pink of dawn? Between point A and point B you exist, you are alive, your breath slowing, your body temperature dropping, the shadows cast by your furniture elongating and shrinking as the moon revolves through the sky above your flimsy house, if that's even where you really are. Every night, anything could happen, and you would never be the wiser. What I'm trying to say is that day, I learned that time doesn't belong to you. All you have is what you remember. A fraction; less.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“Privilege is something to be aware of, to fight to see beyond, but ultimately to be grateful for. It’s like a bulletproof vest; it makes you harder to kill.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“One of us fell easily asleep, a million days left except that particular one, forever almost over, an ending that happens again and again no matter how much I don't want it to. Maybe that's all loss is. What happens, whether you like it or not. What won't let you go.
Marlena - Look. I didn't forget.
I wrote it down.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“Whenever I hear the word danger, I see Marlena and me staring into the mouth of that U-Haul in the winter hour between twilight and dark. Two girls full of plans, fifteen and seventeen years old in the middle of nowhere. Stop, I want to tell us. Stay right where you are, together. Don't move. But we will. We always do. The clock's already running.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“I think it’s pretty common for teenagers to fantasize about dying young. We knew that time would force us into sacrifices—we wanted to flame out before making the choices that would determine who we became. When you were an adult, all the promise of your life was foreclosed upon, every day just a series of compromises mitigated by little pleasures that distracted you from your former wildness, from your truth.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“Above us, the sky, a shattered mirror of the lake, and of course, the stars—as distant and unknowable as every single person I'd ever met, even myself.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“For a teenage girl, a beautiful mother is a uniquely painful curse.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“Nostos algos. I want to go home. A phrase that's stuck on a loop, that I hear before falling asleep, waiting in line for my coffee, tapping the elevator button and rising through the sky to my apartment...and yet my desire is not attached to a particular place...I want to go home but what I mean, what I'm grasping for, is not a place. It's a feeling. I want to go back. But back where? Maybe to the first time I heard Stevie Nicks, to watching the snow fall outside the window with a paperback folded open in my lap, to the moment before I tasted alcohol, to virginity and not really knowing that things die, back to believing that something great is still up ahead, back to before I made the choices that would hem me in to the life I live now. A life that I regret sometimes, I think, only because it's mine, because it's turned out this way and not some other way, because I can't go back and change what will happen.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“Marlena and I were very different, but sometimes, when we were together, we could erase our separate histories just by talking, sharing a joke or a look. But in the kitchen with Mom, the kitchen that was always clean, where there was always something to eat, where the water flowed predictably from the tap and behind every cabinet door were dishes, only dishes, I saw how wrong I was to feel like Marlena and I had so much in common, and how lucky. Because here was the difference that mattered. My skinny mom with her Chardonnay smell and her forgetting to unplug the flat iron, with her corny jokes about broccoli farts and her teeth bared in anger and her cleaning gloves in the backseat of the car, my mom who refused to stop loving me, who made dumb mistakes and drank too much and was my twin in laughter, my mom who would never, ever, leave, who I trusted so profoundly that a world without her in it exceeded the limits of my imagination. That was the difference, and it was huge, and my never seeing it before is something that I still regret.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“Raise your glass. Drink to trying, like this, to bring her back.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“Marlena's body was found on November 19, and so I consider that the anniversary of her death, though she almost certainly died on the eighteenth. Because for me, that day, she was still fully, hugely, annoyingly alive--deliberately ignoring my phone calls, up to something she'd no doubt tell me all about soon.

Twelve days after November 19, I turned sixteen. Every year, it happens the same way: Marlena dies, I get older.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“I was terrified. No matter how far I fell, something pulled me back to safety - school and its occasional fascinating gift, dopey, well-meaning men, and books, books, that's where I found her most often, in the intimacies of characters, Ruth and Sylvie in a towboat, Esperanza on Mango Street, Anna K., of course, right before she jumps.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“I want to go home, I want to go home, but what I mean, what I'm grasping for, is not a place, it's a feeling.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“You can’t steal a whole new life.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“We were already growing apart, in the weeks before she died - when I moved to New York, we almost certainly would have lost touch, become just another pair of girls who shared a brief and intense friendship that faded, as friendships usually do, with age and geography. But I believed every one of those old promises. I would have pitied any adult who told me that things would change. For you, I would have though, but not for us. I was going to leave, yes, but she was supposed to come, too. And didn't she? Those early days in New York, August, the city so hot I walked around drenched in its spit, she was with me all the time, in the things I did if not always in my thoughts. I got a job at a bar where all the waitstaff were Irish and wasn't it her who made me louder when I needed to be, who made me brave at night, walking home with all that cash? She's the way I swear and how I let men look at me or not, she's the bit of steel at my center, either her, herself, or the loss of her. Before that year I was nothing but a soft, formless girl, waiting for someone to come along and tell me who to be.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“Who can recognize the ending as it’s happening? What we live, it seems to me, is pretty much always a surprise.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“Michigan was all lake and sky and stars, and I though back to Marlena asking me that question about dying and still agreed with the answer I'd given. There would be beauty to drowning here, to living your whole life in this place, to never knowing the uglier world outside.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“With Mom's story, my perception of my parents underwent a series of rapid changes, the way letters on an eye exam do when the doctor flips the lenses - clear, then blurred, sharp, then back to incomprehensible fuzz.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“But having lied and stolen, doesn't mean you're a liar and a thief,...”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“The effect Mom had on men infuriated me as a teenager, especially then, before I'd ever had sex. I resented her for failing in that way, too, by not giving me that quality, her charm, her way of making even prescription goggles look sort of geekily elegant. This is your daughter? people always said when she introduced me, like I'd stolen her, forced her to claim me as her own. This? I left them there.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“And we went in. One of us turned first, one of us was already gone. Into our empty houses, two girls at the need of the world, separated by dim rooms just a few dozen feet apart. One of us fell easily asleep, a million days left except that particular one, forever almost over, an ending that happens again and again no matter how much I don't want it to. Maybe that's all loss is. What happens, whether you like it or not. What won't let you go.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“Everyone has a secret life. But when you're a girl with a best friend, you think your secret life is something you can share.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“I’ve never believed in the idea of an innocent bystander. The act of watching changes what happens. Just because you don’t touch anything doesn’t mean you are exempt.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“I want to go back. But back where? Maybe to the first time I heard Stevie Nicks, to watching the snow fall outside the window with a paperback folded open in my lap, to the moment before I tasted alcohol, to virginity and not really knowing that things die, back to believing that something great is still up ahead, back to before I made the choices that would hem me in to the life I live now. A life that I regret sometimes, I think, only because it’s mine, because it’s turned out this way and not some other way, because I can’t go back and change what will happen.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena