The End of Alice Quotes

“I'm nothing you can catch now. I am black powder, I am singe, I am the bomb that bursts the night.”
― A.M. Homes, The End of Alice

“Tell me about your day, your routine, and what you did at the drugstore when the dumb little girl charged you five cents instead of five dollars. Did you speak up? Are you all so lily-white? The harder it gets to be safe and secure, to trust, to find love and understanding—the more you feel entitled, allowed, even encouraged, to cheat, to lie, to steal, and then later, even to kill. That you're just beginning to feel it now only means you have been lucky for too long.”
― A.M. Homes, The End of Alice

“There is a sky and trees, a high wire fence, a long road, and at the end of it you are there, waiting for me. So glad to see you, I say, misses you so much, thought about you ever day.”
― A.M. Homes, The End of Alice

“Silly bug, fly on the wall, our first fight and how quickly we are over it. Of course I don't hate you, dearest, beloved, most cherished, I owe you everything.”
― A.M. Homes, The End of Alice

“Alice, I hand you her name gently, suggesting that if you hold it, carefully as I do, pressed close to the heart, you might at the end of this understand how confusing the beating of two such similar hearts can be and how one finally had to stop.”
― A.M. Homes, The End of Alice

“when we fuck-and we do fuck,frequently-there is some-thing about her skin,about the way we fit into each other, that it is as if I'm inside out, touching myself.there is something between us not made on Earth.”
― A.M. Homes, The End of Alice

“Today's the day. The clock is ticking. I have been summoned to speak. I go before the committee with a chance to exonerate myself, to extricate, or at least explain the debacle that has become my life.
A statement, a simple speech, a song and dance that will set them straight, an incandescent incantation, a charming presentation, a shoe of sorts, the show of shows, it's the only chance I've got. My appeal must be appealing, not entirely revealing, tucking the tendency to be argumentative, artfully augmenting my audacity with the acuity of my observation and the alarming accuracy of my action. What can I possibly say or do? Act normal.”
― A.M. Homes, The End of Alice

“A man of the mouth, formerly the most oral of surgeons, Henry had the habit of giving his lady patients laughing gas, putting them out, then fiercely fucking them, while tugging on their wisdom teeth. His getting caught was a slip of the tongue, so to speak. While he was buried deep in a muff, some sharp thing slipped, and his prize patient, Mrs Mavis Gilette, woke to find a harpoon hole in her cheek and her lost licker languishing on the floor.”
― A.M. Homes, The End of Alice

“Even though I thought I wouldn't - could never - I do enjoy looking at him. It is like seeing one's self, like seeing one's self with a certain sense of remove.”
― A.M. Homes, The End of Alice

“To go there with her and explain in greatest detail the goings-on, to suggest to her that perhaps the sickness she experiences, the nauseating turn, is her own internal structure cramped by the rise of a desire heretofore unknown. I would also suggest that the impulse to 'lose one's lunch,' to spill such rich and fine fare as the 3 or 4 peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches consumed under the elm by the canoe pond only an hour before, is not so much a mark of aversion as a pronouncement of attraction, the making room for greater possibility.”
― A.M. Homes, The End of Alice

“I want to do with her as one would a proper lover, fuck her ferociously,working up an appetite for a beasts breakfast and then returning to bed, to do it again, finally rousing at two or three,to snack, feeding each other in bed like baby birds still in the nest, fucking again, then sleeping until supper with the comfort of newfound familiarity.”
― A.M. Homes, The End of Alice

“The criminal element is contained – held under lock and key – and still it happens. How could it go one without me (us) – is that too narcissistic a mind? What I’m getting at is that, with so many of us locked up, you’d think it would stop. That it continues means that it is you and not me. Tell me about your day, your routine, and what you did at the drugstore when the dumb little girl charged you five cents instead of five dollars. Did you speak up? Are you all so lily-white? The harder it gets to be safe and secure, to trust, to find love and understanding – the more you feel entitled, allowed, even encouraged, to cheat, to lie, to steal, and then later, even to kill. That you are just beginning to feel it now only means you have been lucky for too long.”
― A.M. Homes, The End of Alice

“So many virginities to lose.”
― A.M. Homes, The End of Alice

“Matthew rolls over. "I wanna be your dog," he says to her.”
― A.M. Homes, The End of Alice

“If you are smart, you must know that as I hurt myself- and I feel that I am hurting myself for you- as I assume the burden and beat you to the punch, I loathe you all the more.”
― A.M. Homes, The End of Alice

“I don't remember to forget.”
― A.M. Homes, The End of Alice

“Suddenly, she doesn’t want to die. She has no reason not to, no sudden revelation, except that its equally pointless to die as to not die.”
― A.M. Homes, The End of Alice