Elisa Quotes

“She’d felt ragingly alive in the dream, but now she’s as inert as the eggs cooling on a plate. Ther’s a mirror her in the bedroom, too, but she chooses not to look at it, just in case her hunch is true and she’s invisible.”

“The alarm shakes the bedside table. Without opening her eyes, Elisa feels for the clock’s ice-cold stopper. She’d been in a deep, soft, warm dream and wanted it back, one more tantalizing minute. But the dream eludes wakeful pursuit; it always does. There was water, dark water-that much she remembers. Tons of it, pressing at her, only she didn’t drown. She breathed inside it better, in fact, than she does here, in waking life, in drafty rooms, in cheap food, in sputtering electricity.”

“Her neck scars are a road map, too, aren’t they? Places she’s been best not to remember”

“She sits on the bed to put them on. It is like a knight shoving his hands into a pair of steel gauntlets. As she wiggles the toe for fit, she lets her eyes stray across the slag heap of old LPs.”

“It is beyond belief what Bojangles does, which is why Elisa is ashamed to feel a burst of ego: She could have kept pace with him better than Shirley Temple, if only the world into which she’d been born had been wholly different.”

“Time is against her, but she takes some of it anyway, carefully selecting Daisy-brand pumps with a blue leather flower on a clear plastic throat, as if the choice is of utmost importance. And it is. The Daisys will be the insurgency she brings off tonight, and every night.”

″‘The most intelligent of creatures,’ he offers softly, ‘often make the fewest sounds.‘”

“Feet are what connect you to the ground, and when you are poor, none of that ground belongs to you.”

“So what if he’s alone. We’re all alone.”

“When he looks at me, the way he looks at me, he does not know what I lack or how I am incomplete. He sees me for what I am, as I am. He’s happy to see me every time, every day.”

In Venice, Italy, ten-year-old Elisa finds she must deal with all the unexpected consequences of her beloved eccentric grandmother’s transformation into a giant Aldabra tortoise, native to a small group of coral islands in the Seychelles.

“The way to outsmart death, Elisa dear, is to turn into something else, says Elisa’s grandmother, an actress with a flair for the dramatic. But when it seems as if Nonna might actually be changing literally, Elisa must uncover a series of mysteries.”

“After a moment of suspense, my grandmother would grasp my hands and, in a whisper scented with jasmine and spices, start telling me her favorite legend. That was six years ago, but still, to this day, if I recall the delicate, aromatic fragrance that floated

“And yet isn’t it strange, I though that day. Mamma never comes with me. Doesn’t she ever think it might be dangerous? Hasn’t she seen how wild and isolated is out there? No, that was the point. She’d never seen it. All of sudden two thoughts were colliding in my head.”