following is a list of the lines I underlined in The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune (spoilers ahead):
“He’d accepted long ago that some people, no matter how good their heart was or how much love they had to give, would always be alone.” —pg. 31
“‘Arthur says that we should always make time for the things we like,’ Talia said. ‘If we don’t, we might forget how to be happy.’” —pg. 108
“‘And the spiders?’ ‘Still there.’ ‘But?’ ‘But I can have spiders in my head as long as I don’t let them consume me and them destroy the world as we know it.’” —pg. 157
“‘You’re very dear, Linus Baker.’” —pg. 190
“‘You’re too precious to put into words. I think…it’s like one of Theodore’s buttons. If you asked him why he cared about them so, he would tell you it’s because they exist at all.’” —pg. 306
“‘Did you like your treasure, Mr. Baker?’ Linus looked up at Arthur again. ‘I did,’ he whispered. ‘I liked it more than anything.’” —pg. 332
“It was grief, then, that Linus felt in his little house on Hermes Way. Grief bright and glassy, unlike anything he’d ever experienced before. He was but paper, brittle and thin, and he clutched the photograph to his chest, hugging it close.” —pg. 347
“‘I’ve seen the heart of all of them, and it beats tremendously despite everything they’ve gone through, either by your hand, or others.’” —pg. 361
“His thoughts were all cerulean.” —pg. 365
“Sometimes, he thought to himself in a house in a cerulean sea, you were able to choose the life you wanted. And if you were of the lucky sort, sometimes that life chose you back.” —pg. 396
A wise man once told the anti-christ that he’s more than the sum of his parts. The ingredients to make a vinyl record can be calculated, but you cannot assign value to the music it plays or the comfort of an old, favorite song. [x]
“Unless it’s mad, passionate, extraordinary love, it’s a waste of your time. There are too many mediocre things in life. Love shouldn’t be one of them.”
My girlfriend and I talk a lot about our different generations of queerness, because she was doing queer activism in the 1990s and I wasn’t.
And she’s supportive of my writing about queerness but also kind of bitter about how quickly her entire generation’s history has disappeared into a bland “AIDS was bad, gay marriage solved homophobia” narrative, and now we’re having to play catch-up to educate young LGBTQ+ people about queer history and queer theory. It gets pretty raw sometimes.
I mean, a large part of the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.
“Excuse us,” she said bitterly the other day, not at me but to me, “for not laying the groundwork for children we never thought we’d have in a future none of us thought we’d be alive for.”
“the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is,
in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.”
