Patron Saint Of Liars Quotes

I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.

That was the way things worked. When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all.

People die, terrible things happen. I know this now. You can't pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.

I wrote the last sentence of The Patron Saint of Liars in early April and stumbled out of my apartment and into the beautiful spring feeling panicked and amazed. There is no single experience in my life as a writer to match that moment, the blue of the sky and the breeze drifting in from the bay. I had done the thing I had always wanted to do: I had written a book, all the way to the end. Even if it proved to be terrible, it was mine.

To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid. If you knew how hard or how dangerous something was going to be at the onset, chances are you'd never do it, so if I went back I would never be able to leave again. Now that I knew what leaving meant.

She's growing up," Sister Evangeline said. And I wanted to tell her no, I'm not. Everything is exactly the same.

As long as it's a regular day, not too rough to begin with, the ocean is pretty smooth once you make it out past the first set of waves. That's why people are afriad to swim in the ocean. They try to jump over those waves and get slammed down to the bottom and pulled across the sand like a piece of shell. You've got to go throught them, dive under just when they're rising up for you, set your direction, close your eyes, and just swim like hell. Once you get throught that, you'll find there isn't a better place for swimming because it's the ocean and it goes on forever. You don't have to see anyone if you don't want to. If you look out, away from the beach, it's easy to imagine that there's no one else but you in the whole world, you and maybe a couple of sea gulls.

The world is full of things we’re better off not knowing.

The only thing I wanted was a life that God did not intend for me to have. I suffered the loss of things that were never mine.

She was not one to set her teeth so far into something that she couldn’t let go when presented with the truth.

my mother knew that no woman thought she was beautiful, or beautiful enough, or beautiful in the right way.

People think you have to be going someplace, when, in fact, the ride is plenty.

People die, terrible things happen. I know this now. You can't pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go. But at seventeen, I didn't understand, and so I left.

I imagined that it was possible for people to have talents, great talents, that they never stumbled across in the course of their lives.

They look into the mirror and all they can see is a collection of flaws,

Being alone is something you have to be good at to enjoy

It was a time in my life when a Junior Mint could mean the difference between happiness and unhappiness.

Without worry to protect me, every thought that came into my mind received real attention.

To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid.

I loved her even as she was swimming away from me, even as I was hating her. That’s the way it is, when you’ve loved somebody your whole life. It’s like a direction you go in, even when you don’t want to go anymore.

I had to wait until the thought of not telling you was worse than the thought of telling you. Does

That's why you can eat cheesecake,' she said, and sighed. 'Because you don't. That's the way it works.

and washing it off in the sink. “Finish up your lunch.” “We’re starting now?” “Good a

Forgiveness was at the heart of everything. Because I could not ask, I could not be forgiven.

whisper about, the one who finds out years later, just by accident, that she is not herself at all.

I slept like his sister would have, without trouble or dreams.

You have to remember that they could go at any time, and if a man’s smart he never forgets that.

Eternal rest, grant unto her, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon her. May her soul and all the souls of the faithfully departed rest in peace. Amen.

Maybe once he wished I was his daughter, because it was plain that my news was hard for him to hear.

Whenever I kissed a boy in school, cut a day of classes, argued with my mother, over what I can’t remember, it was not God’s forgiveness I sought, but his. He was the one I told.

it wasn’t the girls you saw at all, only a gathering of distended abdomens, overinflated balloons from which small wisps of girls were attached.

Anyone who knew her at all could see she was a leaver, that she wouldn't know a thing about what it's like to be left.

To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid

I was somewhere outside of Ludlow, California, headed due east toward Kentucky ,whenI realized that I would be a liar for the rest of my life

People die, terrible things happen. I know this now. You can’t pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.

It was an awful thing to never really have the chance to hold somebody until she was dead.

equation at all. She’d never been

carrying

If people do have more than one life in a lifetime, they should be careful to make sure the different versions of the past never overlap.

There are rivers, hundreds of them, running underground all the time, and because of this a man can say he is walking on water.

To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid. If you knew how hard or how dangerous something was going to be at the onset, chances are you’d never do it,

There will always be people there to tell a pretty girl what she should be doing or thinking. At the counter, it’s the pretty girls you can always sell the most to. They never know their minds.” “You

That's the tricky part about being a saint. If you ever think of yourself as one it throws you out of the running. I've known people who thought they were saints, plenty of them, and believe you me, they were anything but.

The love for a woman and the love for a child are not the same thing. With a woman, there's always the sense they're loaning themselves to you. You have to remember that they could go at any time, and if a man's smart he never forgets that.

Memory is a wicked thing that warps and twists. But paper and ink receive the truth without emotion, and they read it back without partiality. That, I believe, is why so few women are taught to read and write. God only knows what they would do with the power of pen and ink at their disposal.

Kentucky, a state whose capital I did not know. I had never wondered about Kentucky, never imagined it as a girl the way I had New York or Houston or Paris. No one I knew had ever been to Kentucky, or was planning on going, and so I thought it would be the last place anyone would look for me. “Tell

sat in my wheelchair and kept my eyes trained on the swinging doors at the end of the hall. Any minute now she’d walk through them and I’d go right up to her and tell her she could go to hell for all I cared. She’d done a rotten job. She had never for a minute put me first. Jesus, look around you, I’d say to her. Saint Elizabeth’s is full of girls who can’t raise their children. At least they’re kind enough to give them away.

You’ve got to go through them, dive under just when they’re rising up for you, set your direction, close your eyes, and just swim like hell. Once you get through that, you’ll find there isn’t a better place for swimming because it’s the ocean and it goes on forever. You don’t have to see anyone you don’t want to. If you look out, away from the beach, it’s easy to imagine that there’s no one else but you in the whole world, you and maybe a couple of sea gulls.

wanted to sit down in the middle of the road and stay there for the rest of my life. Whenever someone came by and said, Hey, Cecilia, what’re you doing there in the road, I’d tell them, missing people was a full-time job, being sorry about what was gone was going to take every waking minute now, so much time and energy that I had no choice but to stay right on that spot until they all decided to come back. I meant it as a joke at first, but then I looked down at the gravel and I really thought about it. I couldn’t wait for them. They weren’t coming back. I’d been trying all my life to figure out what was going on, with my mother, with all those girls that come and then go away. But now I wanted to forget. Right then I decided, as much as I’d wanted to know before, from here on out I didn’t want to know at all.

What a thought, to be nineteen and be willing to give up everything in your life because someone says something to you on a dark beach that sounds romantic.

The love for a woman and the love for a child are not the same thing. With a woman, there’s always the sense that they’re loaning themselves to you. You have to remember that they could go at any time, and if a man’s smart he never forgets that. He’s just grateful for every minute she’s there. But a child you come to expect. Their love is so much like breathing that it’s a part of you, a leg, a lung. The look on Sissy’s face whenever I came into the room was something I now depended on, the feel of her arms wrapped around my neck, the way she called for me when she was scared in the night.

She was lost, like a ring you swore you’d never take off but did, put it in your pocket, and the next thing you knew it was gone. The places to begin looking are as many as the breaths you took in a day.

Everywhere you went you heard the water, the same way you had always heard your breathing, and would later hear the highway, or trains, or women’s voices. But the sound was so much a part of everything that you couldn’t hear it at all then. This is what I took for granted: The sound of the water. The light on the water, day or night. The way you could look out for so long you couldn’t tell the difference between the water and the sky. The sand that blew onto the highway in sheets and formed small dunes against the curbs. The smell of the water. The tough grass that grew from nothing.

Folks forget that a place that’s easy to live in can be hard to grow up in. They’re not the same thing.

One Christmas we saw four movies in a row and didn’t get home until past midnight. It was a day we gave over to enjoying ourselves completely. We felt daring and wild, making so little out of the holiday, doing exactly what we wanted to do for the whole day. And the thing we wanted to do the most was be together.

Come on, Rose,” she said. “Get back to work now.” She handed me the gun. “Lots of girls out there wanting their cookies. Lots of girls who feel as bad as you. You’re not the only one in the world who misses her mother at Christmas.

Do you miss your mother?” I asked her. “Every day of my life,” she said. “Every minute.

Lots of girls who feel as bad as you. You’re not the only one in the world who misses her mother at Christmas.” I stared at her. I was nearly a full foot taller than she was and from where I stood all I could see was a white draped head bobbing up and down over the sugary lumps of dough. “Do you miss your mother?” I asked her. “Every day of my life,” she said. “Every minute.

To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid. If you knew how hard or how dangerous something was going to be at the onset, chances are you’d never do it, so if I went back I would never be able to leave again. Now that I knew what leaving meant.

off

I did not know how to keep going and I did not know how to stop, so I kept going.

When you don’t have a home, it’s easy to get attached to things, people, highways. Wherever you are the longest starts to feel like the place you’re supposed to be,

I was careful with my prayers, now that they had been answered.

Those were good days, in a strange way, the days we thought she was always just around the corner, like prosperity or Christmas.

Now, some days, it feels like a person could just get lost in the world.

Rose,” she said quietly, looking around a little over her shoulder, “you seem to be awfully good at the desserts. Do you know how to make napoleons?” “I think I could figure it out.” “My mother,” she said softly, “made napoleons. I haven’t had one in years.” “Then you leave it to me,” I said. I always had a special fondness for Sister Bernadette because she had been so good to me the first day I arrived. Nothing would have pleased me more than to make a napoleon for her. It was almost as if I could see her roll my promise around in her mouth. “Thank you,” she whispered.

In any crowd of people, Cecilia’s face would always be the first one you’d see. It’s almost like everyone else was there to be around her, arranged in such a way to set off her eyes, her mouth. I’m not even sure now that she was so beautiful, although then I thought she was. It was more that all of her ways were big. She’d built a momentum from being wanted by so many people, and the attention had made her kinder and meaner both.

I tried to talk to her, to tell her about the pain in my chest that could be eased only by a drive, to tell her that May reminded me so much of October and this year of last year, but I couldn’t say things I didn’t have words for yet. All I was sure of was that I loved her, her red lipstick, her delicate hands. Sometimes I drove all the way to San Diego but would only stand in the accessories department, watching her over a counter of scarves while she told another woman how to be beautiful.

There was a difference, I knew, between being pregnant and being a mother. I was pregnant.

There was a time in my life when I’d wanted to know everything. I wanted to read the brutal details of every local murder. I wanted to know exactly how my father had died, the extent of damage to the car, the very place it happened. Facts had a certain irresistible quality. No matter how deeply they disturbed me, I thought I was better off knowing. But learning is easier than forgetting.

So I was Martha Rose, Martha until my father died and Rose after that. My mother had a sudden change of heart then. She saw my father’s need for a name that bore no more significance than the bush that grew alongside the house. A name that was as important as beauty itself.

There were so many things I needed to know, how to fix a car, how to lie. My mother taught me how to put on eyeliner without smudging it, but life was going to take more than that.

I TRIED TO STAY in the marines after I was shot. It was almost like somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that things would be worse, even worse than the hospital and doctors, once I got home. The bullet and the knee were nothing compared to what was coming.

believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should.

don’t know,” I said. The shoe was under the dresser, no telling how it got there, but sitting there with that shoe in my hand, thinking about how my mother had gone out and bought it just out of logic or thoughtfulness, got me all choked up. That’s how it would come back to me, her leaving. In little ways you never would’ve imagined.

What would the church say about something like that?” “The question is, what would God say, and that’s between your mother and God. It’s none of our business.