Top 80 Carol Rifka Brunt Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Who could resist the two of us all squashed into one beautiful person, right?” He smiled.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

52. “And I suddenly understood that getting drunk was just one more way to leave this place, this time.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

53. “Then, into the silence, over the top of everything, came a long, sad howl. For a second it felt like the sound had come from inside me. Like the world had taken everything I was feeling and turned it into a sound.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

54. “I was afraid he wouldn’t remember the joke. I always remember jokes, but some people forget right away and then I end up looking like a weirdo for still remembering something so small.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

55. “It’s the most unhappy people who want to stay alive, because they think they haven’t done everything they want to do.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

56. “I told my mother he looked like a deflated balloon. Greta said he looked like a small gray moth wrapped in a spider’s web. That’s because everything about Greta is more beautiful, even the way she says things.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

57. “How do you become someone with X-ray vision?”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

58. “But being a monk is just one more impossible thing, like traveling to the past or having Finn here forever, because to be a monk you’d have to be a man and you’d also have to believe in God, neither of which was ever going to happen. I don’t think God would create a disease just to kill people like Finn, and if he did, then there’s no way I’d ever even consider worshipping him.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

59. “Places we went back to so many times that they started to.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

60. “You could try to believe what you wanted, but it never worked. Your brain and your heart decided what you were going to believe and that was that. Whether you liked it or not.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

61. “Finn didn’t even seem to care that he was dying,” I said. And it was true. Finn was as calm as ever right up to the very last time I saw him. “Don’t you know? That’s the secret. If you always make sure you’re exactly the person you hoped to be, if you always make sure you know only the very best people, then you won’t care if you die tomorrow.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

62. “The bed was warm and ordinary and perfect, and it had been such a long, long day. Probably the longest day of my life. I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds, if you want them to be there.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

63. “And maybe that’s what it meant. Tell the Wolves I’m Home. Maybe Finn understood everything, as usual. You may as well tell them where you live, because they’ll find you anyway. They always do.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

64. “Until the last light faded. Until the space between the tree branches and the branches themselves became the same dark thing.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

65. “What if she tried to do something to herself? I didn’t want to care, but somehow, like always, I did. She was wired into my heart. Twisted and kinked and threaded right through.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

66. “If teachers pretended that everything they said was off topic, we’d have a whole school full of straight-A students.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

67. “That’s my place. That’s where I stop. In the book A Wrinkle in Time, it says that time is like a big old rumpled blanket. What I’d like is to be caught in one of those wrinkles. Tucked away. Hidden in a small tight fold.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

68. “Sometimes I wondered if I might go through my whole life looking for someone who came even a little bit close.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

69. “It’s the most unhappy people who want to stay alive, because they think they haven’t done everything they want to do. They think they haven’t had enough time. They feel they’ve been shortchanged.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

70. “If I could time-travel, could I be selfless enough to stop Finn from getting AIDS? Even if it meant I would never have him as my friend? I didn’t know. I had no idea how greedy my heart really was.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

71. “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

72. “Either the birds come back to you or they fly away.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

73. “Last year she came into my room first thing in the morning with the saddest look on her face and told me that Finn was dead. She waited for me to wake up completely. She waited until her news sank right into the marrow of my bones. She seemed to be waiting for my reaction, waiting for me to break down or run over to her for support. But I was numb. I sat on my bed, frozen. She stood there awhile longer and then finally gave up. “April Fools,” she said, sounding disappointed.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

74. “Eu imaginava essas coisas porque precisava. Precisava achar que tudo o que ela fizera havia sido por amor. Porque eu podia entender isso. Podia perdoar. Fazia-me pensar que talvez um dia eu conseguisse perdoar a mim mesma.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

75. “Oh,” I said, suddenly feeling immensely sad that somebody would throw their whole life away just to make sure other people were happy.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

76. “But maybe she was right. Maybe it wasn’t that she could change my words; maybe it was that she was able to strip away all the layers until only the truth was left. Ugly and skinless and raw.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

77. “That all the jealousy and envy and shame we carried was our own kind of sickness. As much a disease as Toby and Finn’s AIDS.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

78. “I thought about Finn. How he did whatever he wanted. Just like my mother said. He never let the tunnel squash him. But still, there he was. In the end he was still crushed to death by his own choices. Maybe what Toby said was right. Maybe you had to be dying to finally get to do what you wanted.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

79. “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 after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

80. “All I had was a strange man in the city, and secret trips to Playland, and pleas for help from the dead.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

81. “Preciso descobrir como fazer as coisas sempre voltarem para mim, em vez de sempre irem embora voando.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

82. “Being the sick person seemed better than being the nurse. Lying there, having people get every little thing you might need. Who wouldn’t want that? But then I thought better. The sick person would always be the sick person, but the nurse, she would have to be the nurse for only a little while.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

83. “What if buried under all those leaves is me? Not this me, but the girl in a Gunne Sax dress with the back zipper open. The girl with the best boots in the world. What if she’s under there? What if she’s crying? Because she will be, if I find her. Her tears tell the story of what she knows. That the past, present, and future are just one thing. That there’s nowhere to go from here. Home is home is home.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

84. “Above the tiny fire hung the real portrait. The painted Greta and me watching the real Greta and me watching another copy of ourselves burn away.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

85. “Everyone needs to think they have secrets.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

86. “Sometimes I tell myself that it wasn’t so bad. Being responsible for killing someone who was dying anyway. Murdering a person who was already almost dead. That’s what I try to think sometimes, but it never works. Two months is sixty days, 1,440 hours, 86,400 minutes. I was a stealer of minutes. I stole them from Toby and I stole them from myself. That’s what it came down to. My family would go on forever thinking Toby was a murderer, but they’d never know about me.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

87. “It was like I was in a show about someone almost exactly like myself but not quite.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

88. “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

89. “I didn’t just feel like I was from the suburbs but like I was from someplace a world away from here. Like I didn’t belong but also like I didn’t want to. Like I didn’t care. And in lots of ways that felt just as good as blending in. Maybe even better. It.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt