Quan Barry Quotes

Remember that darkness simply requires another way of seeing. Be your own light. And just like that, you’ll find yourself everywhere instantly.

To be anything but kind in the face of male desire was dangerous. Nobody had to teach us this lesson—it was just something we knew from the earliest days on the playground.

[E]ach of us a candle in the darkness, because while the moon is our soul sister, unlike her we are no one’s reflection—we shine in dark places by the light of our own being.

We danced all night. We danced the length of one song. We danced for just a moment. May we be so lucky as to still be dancing under the light of the Harvest Moon three hundred years on!

Maybe that was their magic. Having fun and enjoying one another’s company. Being lifted up even when you were being beaten down.

What would you yourself do to remain forever young? What would you confess to the great and silent god that watches in the dark?

We were teen girls. Look up the word “blasé” in Merriam-Webster’s and you’d find a picture of us, our eyes burning through your soul from the page.

We should have loved her back, openly and without apology, but between the teen heart and the teen brain, only so much gets done.

The distance between heaven and earth is no greater than one’s intention.

A sea of adolescence streamed by, each of us in our own way trying to both fit in and stand out.

Let X be the moon like a notary. Let Y be all things left unsaid.

It’s like looking through a time machine at ourselves thirty years ago. While the hair is smaller, the hunger is still outsized. Hunger is what gets anything done. Stay hungry, ladies, we think.

Every three hundred years or so, our kind gets loosed upon an unsuspecting world. And this time around, the history books would know us as the 1989 Danvers High School Women’s Varsity Field Hockey team. Be. Aggressive. B-E aggressive.

Third Year German was the only class where she felt vaguely human. They spent the period listening to "99 Luftballons" and trying to work out the lyrics back into English. Hielten sich fur Captain Kirk. When you found German comforting, you knew you were in trouble

Sooner or later, her daughter would find out for herself what it meant to live in a world that pulled the plug on the Van Peebleses.

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more. —JOHN UPDIKE, The Witches of Eastwick

We were taking one step for jocks, one giant leap for jock-kind.

all of us naked as the day we were born, each of us a candle in the darkness, because while the moon is our soul sister, unlike her we are no one’s reflection—we shine in dark places by the light of our own being.

Shortly after getting on the bus, Coach Butler pinchered her head with her headphones and hit PLAY on her Walkman knockoff. It was a Samsung, some cheap Korean brand that would probably bust by the end of the year.

And what happens if we don’t remember? What happens if we never knew? Too many of us are here in the dark because in the rush and clamor of blood the third reptilian brain takes over, the one that says I do not recognize anything of myself in you, and so you are less than nothing.

Life is a wheel. The way we end up where we begin. From here everything rises—the worn path, the moon with its long bright ears. Imagine water traveling back up into the sky, the sound of it climbing like a question. Who would we be if we had stayed?

There are so many things to say in the language of our kind, but really, nothing more needs to be said.

To be anything but kind in the face of male desire was dangerous.

When the only hope is a boat and there is no boat, I will be the boat. I close my eyes and settle in for the three hours it takes us to travel there. This is neither a beginning nor an end. If all life on earth is one chapter in the story of the universe, each cosmic night four billion years long, then am I allowed to write a page in the tale of existence, am I to be granted a single word? Does the story even matter or is the witnessing enough, the being aware of each moment of beauty and hardship along the path? And why do we need to believe our lives must add up to some grand narrative, and what happens when we stop believing this?

From the Latin for “terrible,” “cruel.” Atrox, atrocis. When did the word come to take on such scale? Endless pits gouged in the earth. The Americans in the hamlet of My Lai, some of them shooting themselves in the feet to get out of it. The South Vietnamese with their tiger cages, their filing a man’s teeth down to the gums.

Rebecca Nurse was one of three sisters from the Towne family, each of whom was arrested and accused of witchcraft by the teen bad girls of the day. Rebecca and her sister Mary Eastey were both found guilty thanks to the girls' spectral evidence claims that the elderly sisters were pinching them, poking them with needles, then somehow graduating from pinching and poking to infanticide. Rebecca Nurse was herself the mother of eight. Perhaps the health of her own babies made those less fortunate in that regard suspicious.

It all makes you wonder what you would've done had you been kicking around back then. If a teen girl, would you have followed the herd? If the mother of eight dead babies like Ann Putnam Sr., would you have given yourself a few hard bruises and then gleefully joined in the accusing because what else could explain your misfortunes? If you were a judge and "It" Puritan Cotton Mather, would you have ridden all the way out from Cambridge to see for yourself just what in the heck was going on in Salem Village? Would you have allowed into evidence proof from both this world and the invisible one into which only the purest heart can see?

Mon pauvre petit chou, you say, fanning her with a banana leaf. My poor little cabbage.

We are no one’s reflection— we shine in dark places by the light of our own being

Darkness simply requires another way of seeing. Be your own light.

Fact: like a telephone booth or a pair of size 6 Sasson jeans, the teen brain can hold only so much. This is doubly true when said information does not pertain to it. That’s why teenagers are the original narcissists. It’s not even in one ear, out the other. Truth is, 95% of stuff never wriggles in in the first place.

All I wanted was this place of glory and things that can never be to be.

In the last year of the 80’s, Chi-Chi’s had just opened a restaurant on Route 114, in our eyes the Mexican fried ice cream a divine dessert conceived of on Mars. We were living in a world where up until Chi-Chi’s, Italian food was considered ethnic.

But sometimes you can want something too much, there is always a threshold & a place to fall.