Falls the Breath Quotes

“Ships and ghosts are something alike. When you're on a ship, there's nothing but water and sky. Sometimes it's impossible to tell if the sun is rising or setting. The moment when you're most confused about day and night is what it's like being a ghost. You're caught between two truths and can't find your way, so you wait for an answer.”
― Melodie Ramone, Falls the Breath

“On a ship at dawn and again at dusk, there's only the horizon reflecting off the water. Up and down become the same. The ship might have flipped, and you're sailing in the sky. That's what it's like being a ghost. You're drifting, never sure.”
― Melodie Ramone, Falls the Breath

“Girls liking boys is good practice to find out which ones not to marry later.”
― Melodie Ramone, Falls the Breath

“She often left him feeling like his hands were in the air trying to collect rain to drink.”
― Melodie Ramone, Falls the Breath

“Brimfield stood before him with all its majesty, welcoming him into the drafty recesses of its embrace. Sometimes home seemed too large, like it was a place where someone could scream and never be heard.”
― Melodie Ramone, Falls the Breath

“The library was glowing with lamplight, wintergreen and red mingling with the stormy darkness cast through the curtain wall. From down here, the clouds whirled higher above him, white and grey under a canopy of black. Tornado weather, he thought, and the wind howled rhythmically inside the empty fireplace.”
― Melodie Ramone, Falls the Breath

“The greatest journeys didn’t arrive on smooth breezes. They swept in on gales that brought crashing thunder and torrents of barbwire rain.”
― Melodie Ramone, Falls the Breath

“Her face, made pastel by the light of her computer monitor, reflected in the window. She failed to recognize the girl, thought seeing her now was like a dream belonging to someone else, and that she had been asleep all her life. She didn’t want to see herself, looked beyond the image to the ancient oak tree in the yard. Massive with a crook in the center that looked like a twisted smile, it reached for her with branches that curled like a stranger’s hands.”
― Melodie Ramone, Falls the Breath

“The misty sun came through the window and cast a yellow halo around her, making her eyes glow like clover. Lorenzo yearned to comfort her, but he felt lately that it was his presence over the years that helped put her in her state. She was an attractive, bright, and funny girl who should have been living a bold teenage life, but she existed with one foot in the living world and one in the grave. What he hadn’t known when he fell in love with her as a stepbrother would adopt a new, much younger sister, was that when ghosts touched a person directly, it changed them and separated them from their society. Eleni had seen things regular people couldn’t and experienced things that defied their reality and religious beliefs, and, frankly, terrified them to a point where they shunned her by reflex. In a way, her relationship with the dead made her a ghost herself, quiet, looming on the outskirts, largely unseen.”
― Melodie Ramone, Falls the Breath