Simone St. James > Quotes

“The person who could be truly alone, in the company of no one but oneself and one’s own thoughts—that person was stronger than anyone else. More ready. More prepared.”
― Simone St. James, The Sun Down Motel

“For the odd girls, the nerdy girls, and the murderinos. This one is yours.”
― Simone St. James, The Sun Down Motel

“That was what the books did—they turned off your thinking for you, put their thoughts in your head so you wouldn't have your own.”
― Simone St. James, The Broken Girls

“You can't imagine how hard it is to come home from hell and be expected to pick up the threads of a life. Apply for jobs, go to a factory, punch in, punch out. Put your lunch in a bag and get on the omnibus every day. Like nothing happened. Nothing.”
― Simone St. James, The Haunting of Maddy Clare

“I believed in Oxford, and cobblestoned squares, and old bricks thick with ivy,a nd rainy days curled up reading books. I believed in my mother's strong coffee and in the lonely, aching scent of early dawn before anyone else in my boardinghouse was awake. I believed in my favorite men's cardigan and the way the wind felt on the back of my neck. I believed in life as it lay before me, spinning out slowly, day after day of warm springs and thunderstorms and laughter. These were the things I believed in.”
― Simone St. James, An Inquiry into Love and Death

“I was doomed to it. For there was no way to convince him that, with all his scars, the terrible truth was that he was still the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.”
― Simone St. James, The Haunting of Maddy Clare

“I put my book down, finding a Post-it note to use as a bookmark, because folding the corner of a page—even in a thirty-year-old book—is sacrilege.”
― Simone St. James, The Sun Down Motel

“Books were her salvation. As a child, she’d had a shelf of childhood favorites that she loved enough to read over and over again. But after, during the hospital stay and the long voyage and the cold days in Idlewild’s dreary hallways, books became more than mere stories. They were her lifeline, the pages as essential to her as breathing.”
― Simone St. James, The Broken Girls

“Sonia envied her, the way she could turn her brain off, think about absolutely nothing. It was a trick Sonia herself had never learned. That was what books did - they turned off your thinking for you, put their thoughts in your head so you wouldn't have your own.”
― Simone St. James, The Broken Girls

“This place is dark.” “Some of us like the dark. It’s what we know.”
― Simone St. James, The Sun Down Motel

“the books I read were the dark kind—about scary things like disappearances and murders, especially the true ones. While other kids read J. K. Rowling, I read Stephen King. While other kids did history reports about the Civil War, I read about Lizzie Borden.”
― Simone St. James, The Sun Down Motel

“Am I bitter or am I sweet? Ladies can be either.”
― Simone St. James, The Book of Cold Cases

“But a novel always ends, the lies come to the surface, and the deaths are explained. Maybe one of the bad characters gets away with something—that’s fashionable right now—but you are still left with a sense that things are balanced, that dark things come to light, and that the bad person will, at least, most likely be miserable.”
― Simone St. James, The Book of Cold Cases

“Books, Sonia had decided, were what she would live with when she finally left this place. She would work in a library—any library, anywhere. She’d sweep the floors if she had to. But she’d work in a library, and she’d read the books every day for the rest of her life.”
― Simone St. James, The Broken Girls

“I took my glasses off and set them to the table... The world went pleasantly blurry, and I didn´t have to see the details anymore.”
― Simone St. James, The Sun Down Motel

“How it didn’t matter how afraid or how careful you were—it could always be you.”
― Simone St. James, The Sun Down Motel

“I’m the one you didn’t kill,”
― Simone St. James, The Sun Down Motel

“What will I write in this beautiful book?
She carried the book to class for the rest of the day, and that night she put it under her pillow, still blank. She liked it blank right now, liked to know that it was waiting, listening. Just like her friends.”
― Simone St. James, The Broken Girls

“I think it’s instructive to be awake in the middle of the night every once in a while. To really see what you’re missing while you’re usually sleeping.”
― Simone St. James, The Sun Down Motel

“There are large moments in life; but sometimes it is the small moments - the casual moments - that change everything. The second's absent wandering of attention before an accident. The choice to take one road, instead of another.”
― Simone St. James, The Haunting of Maddy Clare

“It made no sense, but guilt doesn't have to. It simply exists, weighing you down and chocking you until you can't breathe anymore.”
― Simone St. James, The Book of Cold Cases

“There is no justice, Malcolm had told her once, but we stand for it anyway. Justice is the ideal, but justice is not the reality.”
― Simone St. James, The Broken Girls

“I bet you could sleep in the right place,” I said. “Not just at the motel. You can’t spend the rest of your life here. I bet you could sleep if you were in a place that made you happy. Where you knew you’d wake up to something good.”
― Simone St. James, The Sun Down Motel

“I was struck again by the deep quiet of the countryside, the absence of any human sounds; my mind still expected the clamor of cars, voices, all the clatter of nonstop human movement. Here was only the hushed patter of the drizzle, the call of birds in faraway trees. The air was impossibly sweet, like wine. A crow called from somewhere, its voice dark and throaty.”
― Simone St. James, The Haunting of Maddy Clare

“Being a girl is the best,” she said, “because no one ever believes you’d do something bad. People think you’ll do nothing, which means you can do anything. I’ll show you.”
― Simone St. James, The Book of Cold Cases

“The person who could be truly alone, in the company of no one but oneself and one’s own thoughts—that person was stronger than anyone else.”
― Simone St. James, The Sun Down Motel

“It was the girls who locked themselves away, who had never felt the loving touch of a man, who, when they loved, loved the fiercest.”
― Simone St. James, The Haunting of Maddy Clare

“Stories don’t always end the way they’re supposed to. They don’t always end at all.”
― Simone St. James, Murder Road

“The thought bubbled through my mind, unbidden: I don’t want to do this anymore. I want more. Surviving to tomorrow wasn’t good enough. Not anymore.”
― Simone St. James, Murder Road

“You suspected me of murder?” I said. “I suspect everyone of murder,” he replied.”
― Simone St. James, An Inquiry into Love and Death