Astrid Magnussen Quotes

“It was torture for me to try to fit in as a girl among other girls. Girls my own age were a different species entirely.”

“She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress.”

“I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of water, the chink of dogs’ leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother’s dip-pen, the smell of the tree, the stillness. I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck.”

“Now I wished she’d never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.”

“That was a day with a trapdoor, and we all fell through.”

“I loved his brown eyes, the way he looked so worried, as if he’d never seen a kid throw up before.”

“‘Is it terrible here? Do they hurt you?’ ‘Not as much as I hurt them.‘”

“A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn’t help wanting it.”

“The teachers’ mouths opened and butterflies burst out, too fast to capture.”