But they gave me Finn. He said it like maybe it was worth the trade. Like it was something he would do again if he had the choice. Like he would take a man's legs and give away years of his own freedom if it was the only way. I thought how that was wrong and terrible and beautiful all at the same time.

— Carol Rifka Brunt

But you don't know what it was like. It was just the two of us that afternoon, and then. . . And then it was just me.

— Carol Rifka Brunt

I dream about people who don't need to have sex to know they love each other. I dream about people who would only ever kiss you on the cheek.

— Carol Rifka Brunt

... I felt the wall between the world of secrets and the real world start to collapse. I felt the girls from the portrait becoming us and us becoming them...

— Carol Rifka Brunt

If you close your eyes when you sing in Latin, and if you stand right at the back so you can keep one hand against the cold stone wall of the church, you can pretend you're in the Middle Ages. That's why I did it. That's what I was in it for.

— Carol Rifka Brunt

I like the word clandestine. It feels medieval. Sometimes I think of words as being alive. If clandestine were alive, it would be a pale little girl with hair the color of fall leaves and a dress as white as the moon.

— Carol Rifka Brunt

I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.

— Carol Rifka Brunt

I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn't like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half the size. . . . I figured that, on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you'd have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed.

— Carol Rifka Brunt

I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I kept looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand.

— Carol Rifka Brunt

I suppose I'm in that very small group of people who are not waiting for their own story to unfold. If my life was a film, I'd have walked out by now.

— Carol Rifka Brunt