Darby Thorne Quotes

“Darby preferred to live her life wide-eyed, tormented, running, because nothing can catch you if you never stop.”

“But she’d seen it. There was no unseeing it.”

“Inhale. Count to five. Exhale. Forward motion.”

“Sometimes God puts people exactly where they need to be. Even when they don’t know it.”

“She remembered walking back from there last month, half-drunk with a gaggle of half-friends from her dorm, and when one of them asked her (only half-giving a shit) where she’d planned to go for Christmas break, Darby had answered bluntly: that it would require an act of God Himself to make her come back home to Utah. And apparently He’d been listening, because He’d blessed Darby’s mother with late-stage pancreatic cancer.”

“You’re smug, you’re irritating, you talk too much, you’re not half as clever as you think you are, and under it all? You’re pure evil.”

“Then, like a levee breaking, it all came out: “I took advantage of her. I manipulated her. I called her horrible things. I stole her car once, with a shoelace. I’d leave, for days at a time, without telling her where I’d gone or who I was out with. I must have given her ulcers. When I . . . when I left for college, we didn’t even say goodbye. I just got in my Honda and drove to Boulder. I stole a bottle of her gin from the cabinet on my way out.”

“Her nerves were shredded, her muscles sagging meat.

“Jay, I promise I will get you out of here. I will save you.”

“He could still taste her lips from when he’d kissed her in the restroom. He’d never forget it. The sweet sourness of Red Bull, coffee, and the bacteria on her teeth. The humility of it, the realness of a pretty girl with bad breath.”

“We have to see Darby Thorne again. We owe her something that can’t be written on a check.”

“Up and down lost all meaning. Her world became a violent tumble-dryer, an endless, crashing kaleidoscope.”