Isabel Conklin Quotes

“To me, my mother wasn’t that mysterious. She was my mother. Always reasonable, always sure of herself. To me, she was about as mysterious as a glass of water. She knew what she wanted; she knew what she didn’t want.”

“The air tasted just the same, smelled just the same. The wind making my hair feel sticky, the salty sea breeze, all of it felt just right. Like it had been waiting for me to get there.”

“My mother was good at that, making people feel normal. Safe. Like as long as she was there, nothing truly bad could happen.”

“It was like coming home after you’d been gone a long, long time. It held a million promises of summer and of what just might be.”

“Over his shoulder Conrad said, ‘Good night Belly.’ And that was it. I was in love”

“Sometimes it’s like people are a million times more beautiful to you in your mind. It’s like you see them through a special lens — but maybe if it’s how you see them, that’s how they really are. It’s like the whole tree falling in the forest thing.”

“It was a summer I would never, ever forget. It was the summer everything began. It was the summer I turned pretty. Because for the first time, I felt it. Pretty, I mean. Every summer up to this one, I believed it’d be different. Life would be different. And that summer, it finally was.”

“Everything that happened this past summer, and every summer before it, has all led up to this. To now.”

“For me, it was almost like winter didn’t count. Summer was what mattered. My whole life was measured in summers.”

“I think he would have stayed with her forever, trying to figure out the mystery. He was a puzzle solver, the kind of person who likes theorems, theories. X always had to equal something. It couldn’t just be X.”