Quan Barry Quotes

• “To be anything but kind in the face of male desire was dangerous. Nobody had to teach us this lesson—it was just something we knew from the earliest days on the playground.”

  Quan Barry

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• “Remember that darkness simply requires another way of seeing. Be your own light. And just like that, you’ll find yourself everywhere instantly.”

  Quan Barry

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• “Maybe that was their magic. Having fun and enjoying one another’s company. Being lifted up even when you were being beaten down.”

  Quan Barry

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• “We danced all night. We danced the length of one song. We danced for just a moment. May we be so lucky as to still be dancing under the light of the Harvest Moon three hundred years on!”

  Quan Barry

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• “[E]ach of us a candle in the darkness, because while the moon is our soul sister, unlike her we are no one’s reflection—we shine in dark places by the light of our own being.”

  Quan Barry

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• “And what happens if we don’t remember? What happens if we never knew? Too many of us are here in the dark because in the rush and clamor of blood the third reptilian brain takes over, the one that says I do not recognize anything of myself in you, and so you are less than nothing.”

  Quan Barry

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• “It’s like looking through a time machine at ourselves thirty years ago. While the hair is smaller, the hunger is still outsized. Hunger is what gets anything done. Stay hungry, ladies, we think.”

  Quan Barry

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• “We should have loved her back, openly and without apology, but between the teen heart and the teen brain, only so much gets done.”

  Quan Barry

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• “all of us naked as the day we were born, each of us a candle in the darkness, because while the moon is our soul sister, unlike her we are no one’s reflection—we shine in dark places by the light of our own being.”

  Quan Barry

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• “What would you yourself do to remain forever young? What would you confess to the great and silent god that watches in the dark?”

  Quan Barry

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• “Life is a wheel. The way we end up where we begin. From here everything rises—the worn path, the moon with its long bright ears. Imagine water traveling back up into the sky, the sound of it climbing like a question. Who would we be if we had stayed?”

  Quan Barry

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• “Shortly after getting on the bus, Coach Butler pinchered her head with her headphones and hit PLAY on her Walkman knockoff. It was a Samsung, some cheap Korean brand that would probably bust by the end of the year.”

  Quan Barry

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• “Sooner or later, her daughter would find out for herself what it meant to live in a world that pulled the plug on the Van Peebleses.”

  Quan Barry

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• “Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more. —JOHN UPDIKE, The Witches of Eastwick”

  Quan Barry

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• “From the Latin for “terrible,” “cruel.” Atrox, atrocis. When did the word come to take on such scale? Endless pits gouged in the earth. The Americans in the hamlet of My Lai, some of them shooting themselves in the feet to get out of it. The South Vietnamese with their tiger cages, their filing a man’s teeth down to the gums.”

  Quan Barry

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• “A sea of adolescence streamed by, each of us in our own way trying to both fit in and stand out.”

  Quan Barry

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• “All I wanted was this place of glory
  and things that can never be
  to be.”

  Quan Barry

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• “Every three hundred years or so, our kind gets loosed upon an unsuspecting world. And this time around, the history books would know us as the 1989 Danvers High School Women’s Varsity Field Hockey team. Be. Aggressive. B-E aggressive.”

  Quan Barry

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• “In the last year of the 80’s, Chi-Chi’s had just opened a restaurant on Route 114, in our eyes the Mexican fried ice cream a divine dessert conceived of on Mars. We were living in a world where up until Chi-Chi’s, Italian food was considered ethnic.”

  Quan Barry

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• “But sometimes you can want something too much, there is always a threshold & a place to fall.”

  Quan Barry

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• “Let X be the moon like a notary.
  Let Y be all things left unsaid.”

  Quan Barry

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