Thirst for Salt Quotes

“It never really goes away, the longing for the life not lived, because isn’t that part of how we come to know ourselves too? Through what we lack as much as what we have, all we dream but do not hold. Some desires have no resolution.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“There must be people out there who are not drawn to the shadow of what could have been, who feel no pull toward the other lives they could be living, but I certainly have never been one of them.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I hated the way they spoke like that. As if there could be no measurement of their past in years. As if I, so young, couldn't possibly understand the way time worked, and what it did to people.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Do you still love Jude?

I think a part of me always will.

It always feels that way at first, she said. But it will stop. I promise.

And I didn't know then if that was better, if I even wanted it to. At the time, that seemed to be like the saddest thing.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“We can never really know how we are perceived by others--especially those who come, in time, to love us, those initial impressions overlaid with the knowledge of later intimacies.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“As if it were possible to circumnavigate memory.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“It was hard to argue with him when he played the card of time--his winning hand, all those years he had over me.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Looking back, it seems that was how Jude always was with me: keeping his distance, never asking for anything I might not want to give. That steadiness that I took to be a strength--his consistency--I realize now was a kind of boundary, a way of drawing a line in the sand. Like a sprinkling of salt at the threshold, it was a kind of spell to keep himself safe, unchanged. What he needed more than anything was to believe he needed nothing, that if I should ever leave, he'd remain the same man. But I had his key in my coat pocket and I was happy then, because it seemed like he was letting me in.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Even when we were not touching we were one, joined by an invisible thread, like Jude had said about the moon and tide.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“It's not so easy, I'd tried on one occasion to explain, to tell what keeps people together, what makes them fall apart. You can leave someone and still love them. You can lie with someone and never love them at all.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Though later I'd decide this was noncommittal, evasive, at the time it struck me as generous, a swelling in my chest, another unfamiliar feeling -- assurance, or security, or trust. we were in this together, we'd figure it out, and that made our love seem durable.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“In this way my love for him mirrored my mother's love for my father, which, despite their separation, had endured--call it habit, call it time, call it memory, the memory of love. It's not so easy, after wall, to cut that invisible thread.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“But nothing had really happened yet, I thought. What I'd lost, it seemed it was and would only ever be imaginary. What was I crying for, except the loss of one vision of what my life might have been, one I'd lived out in dreams? As all lovers learn, when love ends, you lose the future as well as the past.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“It never really goes away, the longing for the life not lived, because isn't that part of how we come to know ourselves too? Through what we lack as much as what we have, all we dream but do not hold. Some desires have no resolution.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“what good is a home once the ones you love have left it? What good is a home that has failed to keep them all safe, contained, within reach?”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“What continues to surprise me, and what I still don't understand, is not the reason that love ends but the way that it endures.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Or maybe it was because I was in love, and I wanted to create a tangible testament to that, the way people in love always want to document it somehow. What I longed for was a guarantee that if this love ever ended, at least there'd be a record of it, outside of the two of us and our two bodies. Though part of me knew, of course, that it could never work like that--what a burden to put on a child.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I could never be bored, I thought, if he was nearby. It was the stage of love, where even the most mundane activity seemed like an adventure.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“What continues to surprise me, and what I still don’t understand, is not the reasons that love ends but the way that it endures.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“The trouble is that our dreams, like our memories, are not immune to revision.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Do you love me? Do you love me? I asked, shaking him awake in the dark.

His rotation of answers:
You know I do.
Don't make me say it all the time or it will lose its meaning.
If I didn't, would I still be here, in bed with you?

I needed to hear it, the reassurance of those words. Repeating it to him over and over that winter, IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou, like a prayer. Sometimes I would keep myself awake after Jude had fallen asleep to look at his face, missing him even in sleep. So sure, in these moments, that if he ever tried to leave me, I wouldn't let him. Undignified, the scene I'd make. Not too proud to beg.

I wanted us to be like rocks or anchors, keeping each other in place. Love, I'd read, was supposed to be a light and weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“The way he looked at me sometimes, on waking: as if I were a surprise, a gift, my appearance in his life miraculous. He called me Love, as if it were my name. As if I could be the very thing itself.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“And while intellectually I knew that both things could be true--that the love and regret did not necessarily cancel each other out--it was difficult for me to contemplate because a function of that love meant wanting me to make different choices, and might this also imply that she considered them mistakes?”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“...forgetting that there might come a time when once again I had to live... I could not survive on love alone. Forgetting, most of all, that we had been together only four months and we were delicate and untested.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Stooping to kiss below my ear, pulling me close from behind. Running his hands over my body, soft in a black sweater, holding my breasts, slipping his fingers into my tights. How quickly his moods changed, pivoting like someone turning sharply on a boot heel. Vague thought before I closed my eyes, leaned into his hands--how many other women had he reached toward as a distraction?”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I think now that Jude kept me waiting that night to prove to me, and to himself, that he could. You want a dog, not a man, he said to me on another occasion, when I was angry at him for coming home late or not answering his phone. Someone to come whenever you whistle, whenever you call. He wanted to feel free, and to Jude that meant belonging to no one. Maybe he liked women who played along with those kinds of games, pushing him away only to pull him back again. To behave badly and be reprimanded in order to be forgiven--somewhere along the course of his life, Jude had learned this as a kind of love. And while I was slow to trust, to let people in, I loved without reservation once I did, and in this way I was stronger than him.

Although I did not feel strong then, when out of relief, rage, frustration, I began to cry.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Jude turned to me with a look I didn't recognize.

Can we keep him? he said.

I remember he said it that way--we. For so long I'd felt like a beggar for his love, and now, for the first time, he was asking something of me. To share with him something that would be ours together.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I knew what it was like to love like that--to want everyone you love to be within sight, within reach.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“We didn't choose King, I told my mother. He chose us. Or we chose each other. Or maybe it wasn't even a choice at all. Like love.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Love -- great love, as Jude would say -- has a way of seeming both miraculous and inevitable. That kind of love, it alters the past as well as the future.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt