Ilsa Bick Quotes

They call it the drowning instinct. It's when drowning doesn't look like drowning.

Follow your heart. Just don't get lost.

This is a fairy tale with teeth and claws.

Obeying orders just to obey is the mark of a person who has ceased to think. Remember, it is better to suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong.

But sticking to rules just because they're there does not make them right. You need to learn when the rules should be broken.

What's the point of not taking chances? I don't know if I could stand living my whole life afraid.

Why can't you like me?" he said, his voice breaking. His scent steamed then, hot and heady with a welter of contradictions: apples and fire and electric roil of those cold, black shadows. "Why can't you like me just a little?" She would never know how she might have answered, because he never gave her the chance. Instead, he kissed her.

It was that stages-of-anger thing. I was shocked and then I got pissed and then I fought like hell … and then I went numb. They called it acceptance, but it wasn’t. It’s what happens when you have only two choices: live with the monster, or kill yourself.

She's got the kind of ethereal, unselfconscious beauty some young girls possess that breaks your heart. Or theirs.

Everybody breaks sooner or later, Bob. Anyone can drown. Sometimes you see it. Most often, you don’t because the body protects and the skin hides, so drowning doesn’t look like drowning and some people scar so nicely. Take it from an expert.

We all have our fictions, little lies we tell ourselves to keep going from one day to the next.

My English teacher said that a writer is the worst judge of his own work.

Sometimes you don't know what you need until it's gone

We were like matching bookends, almost touching but with volumes between us and stories, so many stories.

That´s the problem with the truth. Sometimes the truth is ambiguous, or really bad cliche.

So I need the story, Jenna. I need the truth. Right, like the two are the same thing.

No one can help but stare at the monster, because horror is a cousin to awe.

Run, she told herself. Run, you idiot, run. But she didn't. She couldn't. She just... couldn't.

Those brain-zapped kids weren’t the only - or maybe even the worst - enemy.

As the dog sprinted back, Jack said to the girl, "Sweetheart,honey, why do you have to be so hateful?" "Why not?" Ellie said. "It's not like being good ever got me anywhere.

I am a ghost in a land of phantoms and forgotten nightmares.

The grief in her green eyes slips then hardens and, for an instant, Pendleton sees the woman she has become and has no right being, not at sixteen.

Because if you can just hold off the moment when you must confront reality, time stands still and you can keep pretending that life will continue as you´ve known it: that nothing-not even something as wonderful and as terrible as love-has broken your world beyond repair.

For that matter, my heart is broken. So maybe they´ĺl give me his. It´s something to shoot for. And maybe, in all that, Bob? There is forgiveness...

People drown, quietly, before our eyes, all the time.

When the heart sinks, people fall.

What you couldn't see and only imagined was always scarier than what was real.

The things you think about when you're a hair's breath away from getting yourself killed.

Not everyone wears their scars on their skin.

Honestly, Bob: how do you carve a scream?

They call it the drowning instinct. It´s when drowning doesn´t look like drowning. In real life, if the water´s very cold, a person can´t help but gasp. It´s reflex. The thing is as soon as water hits your lungs, your throat closes off, even it the water´s warm. Your body´s trying to protect itself, and the reality is that a lot more people suffocate than truly drown. Regardless, to people on land, especially when you´re really close to the end, you don´t look like you´re in trouble. You don´t scream, but that´s because you can ´t, and you don´t wave your arms either or expend a lot of energy flailing. You´re just there. So people don´t notice that you´re drowning. That´s me. I think I´ve been drowning all this time and doing it so quietly, even I didn´t know it.

There are those individuals who die for a cause, and we say they have made the ultimate sacrifice. We call them martyrs, and we never doubt their sincerity. Yet many others search their entire lives for something—or someone—worth dying for and this is very different. These are the lonely and the desperate, fearful that their lives have no meaning. They yearn for the bullet, if only someone else will pull the trigger.

...she said all writers were prima donnas, drunks, social misfits, pompous, or depressed. Brilliant, maybe, but completely crazy.

I don't know what I expected. No, I'm lying. I know what I wanted.

Tell yourself you’re dead, the way Matt does, so the past can’t hurt you.

That pain moves when you move; it mutters between every breath; it spikes your ears; it rips. You think pain can’t be any more horrible than that. Until you discover that the well is bottomless. There’s always more.

There are those individuals who die for a cause, and we say they have made the ultimate sacrifice. We call them martyrs, and we never doubt their sincerity. Yet many others search their entire lives for something—or someone—worth dying for and this is very different. These are the lonely and the desperate, fearful that their lives have no meaning. They yearn for the bullet, if only someone else will pull the trigger.

Don't get so caught up in looking behind you forget to look ahead.

I think. I sense. I wonder.

With no sense of smell, your memories dropped like pennies out of a ripped pocket, until the past was ashes and your parents were blanks: nothing more than the holes in Swiss cheese.

So I think I’ll stay here a little while longer. There’s plenty of time to get off this gurney and open that door and rejoin the rest of you. There’s all the time I have left on Earth. There’s the rest of my life.

The familiar was usually invisible; how many people really noticed everything they saw?

Monster or not, he was risking his neck to save her.

I gargled a laugh, but I'd never felt more like crying in my life. "I'm fine.

As a doc, though, I've seen what happens when people are under a lot of stress. Doesn't always bring out their best. When people are scared, they get angry. They'll do things they never thought they would. They'll bargain and compromise in order to survive; they'll chase after miracle cures and believe just about anything so long as it gives them hope. When hope fails, then watch out. Some people get brutal. They'll turn on each other; they'll become their own worst enemies.

What about study hall? Shouldn't I go to the library? "What for, Ms. Lord?" Mr. anderson said. "You're with me

I doubted I would need my eyes. I drew in the dark, after all.

It was, come to think of it, a little like a kinder, gentler Psycho-Dad making one of his command decisions. Exactly the same, only without all the fuss and blood.

I am a ghost in a land of phantoms and remembered nightmares.

You really didn't appreciate how thick, how powerful water was until you had to fight it.

Raccoon." She saw Ellie put a hand to her mouth to cover the giggles and then looked back at Tom. "Like, you caught it?" "Well, it sure didn't get Fed-Exed [...]

...what's the point of not taking chances? I don't know if I could stand living my whole life afraid.

I´d never heard a man cry before, Bob, but...it´s awful. (...) I think some man aren´t used to it and don´t know what to do with all that feeling. Their emotions are hexane ignited in their chests and rips them apart, and then they feel like they´re going to die-just as something was dying, at that moment in Mitch.

You know, Bob, school is school, one of those life experiences we kids all have to get through in order to become you. Then we wonder what all the fuss was about, especially while we're cleaning up your little messes: toxic waste, war, bank bailouts. Honestly, if we ran up debt the way you guys do? You'd ground us, take away our cells, and make us clean toilets with a toothbrush until we'd pay back every penny.

This Army of Light was mine. I had summoned it. I had DRAWN it. Could I have stopped it? I don't know. The truth is, I didn't want to.

..... desire is so much sweeter when you cant have it.

I didn't throw the paper away. Maybe I should have. Oh, the things you know in retrospect.

...She'd drawn the moment of her death. No. NO. She'd DRAWN herself to death.

A chronic headache muttered in her temples, but like Barrett said, no one ever died from pain. True, but some days you didn't much enjoy living either.

Sometimes when you're sad, it's easier to be angry.

How come adults got away with saying things that would sound rude coming out of her mouth?

Obeying orders just to obey is the mark of a person who has ceased to think.

Fighting tricks you into believing you can change the past, even when the past is dead and gone and all of it ashes.

As long as you're alive, there is hope...Hope is saying that I will live one more day, and that is a blessing, too.

Staying alive just to stay alive isn't enough.

How people react is going to be based on how you react.

Dewerman was this bearded 1960’s throwback: a Teletubby in tie-dye, suspenders, and thinning hair scraped back into a stringy gray rat.

Neither was evil. They were both true to who they are.

Something my shrink once said bubbled up from memory: believing that everything is your fault is like saying the world revolves around you and that is pure narcissism and no less destructive.

Thinking about all that was exhausting. Despite the hours I‘d spent getting shrink-wrapped, I still wasn‘t sold that talking did a whole heck of a lot except let everyone else know what was going on inside your head. It‘s not like talking ever made anything go away.

Would it interest you, at all, to know that he did try to scramble back onto the ice? That his hands grabbed and his fingers clawed, but the ice—that treacherous, greedy, teasing ice—kept breaking and breaking and breaking, sketching a path straight for me? And that when he saw what would happen to me, he stopped trying to save himself? Would you believe that someone could love anyone that much?

Clinging to science was, when you got right down to it, just a god of a different flavor.

-But all sympathetic magic has some basis in fact. The brain's wired to seek the mystical, so...- -Just because we're hardwired to want to believe doesn't make it true.-

The old man stroked a finger over a wooden charm hung around [redacted]'s chest on a leather cord. -{redacted] believed it would protect you. Whether it did is immaterial. It was something [redacted] could give, and in return, that gave [redacted] courage. It gave [redacted] faith. But all emotions are chemically mediated and may be manipulated. Every drunk, every lover, any ecstatic mystic knows that. There is no heart without the head.-

-When someone is beyond help, when there is no hope, it's a choice. When we know for certain, when the dogs warn us that a child is turning, it's still a choice.- -A choice between what and what?- -What do you think? If you were turning, if you knew that you'd try to kill your friends, people you loved...are you telling me that you'd choose to become one of them?- -Between what and what?- Where there was life, there was hope.

Most looked happy. I thought. Hard to tell, actually. What can you tell from a face?

You want to brawl. You want to fight. Fighting tricks you into believing you can change the past, even when the past is dead and gone and all of it ashes.

But every second I'm alive is one more moment I still have a chance to do something.

How could you get past a splinter that had worked into your eye and scratched deeper every time you blinked?

A word of advice, sweetheart: when you're at the brink; when it's a choice between what's safe and what might be better, even if what's best is also scary, take a chance, honey.

with every vet Jed knew. He’d taken a bullet through the left eye, which was bad enough, but then the round’s diagonal trajectory had cored down and out the back of his head. In an instant, his left eye was jelly and his right occipital lobe went from functional to oatmeal. Technically, his right eye still worked, but the brain damage meant that, after ’Nam, he couldn’t read or recognize words. Color was gone, too. His waking world had existed in ashy shades of gray, although his dreams and the flashbacks were always in Technicolor. Worse, his brain had conjured eerie shimmers the Navy shrinks said were hallucinations, like visual phantom limbs. Like Grace, though … these days, he was different. Now he stood, looking up at that distant cabin. Oh, he was still blind in that left eye, the eyeball itself long gone and the socket filled with a plastic implant sheathed with flesh. He never had gotten around to getting fitted for an artificial eye, maybe because he didn’t mind making other people uncomfortable. Vietnam was wedged in his brain, good and tight, like a stringy piece of meat caught between his teeth that wouldn’t be dislodged for love or money. So why should everybody else forget if he couldn’t? But his good right eye still worked, nowadays better than ever, and that was what he aimed at the

Don't you find it fascinating, boy-o, that the people who call on God the most believe in God the least?

After that leap, she really believed she might dare anything, because no matter what, if she jumped, her father would be waiting to swim by her side, stroke for stroke, into forever. Of course, she was nine and her dad was immortal. And nothing lasts forever.

All you have to do is reach out and take his hand.

Everything I touched turned bad.

it'll be okay. We're going to get through this the way we always have.

So that's when I decided that I had to help myself. I'm seventeen, for heaven's sake.

I felt like a little kid inside, like there was this other me who was about five and wanted to be told everything would be okay. Maybe everybody feels that way.

You only want to brawl. You want a fight. Fighting tricks you into believing you can change the past, even when the past is dead and gone and all of it ashes,” said Jess.

Best you shake the dust off your sandals, girl," Jess said. "The past is past