The Book of Dahlia Quotes

“It's decidedly bizzare, when the Worst Thing hppens and you find yourself still conscious, still breathing.”
― Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia

“She developed a kind of disdain for her only sibling usually reserved for despotic political regimes and perpetrators of genocide.”
― Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia

“Why so profane, ask the bookclubbers? Because we are talking here about death, and fuck you if you don't like it: You're going to die, too. This is serious. Fuck fuck fuck.”
― Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia

“For as long as wimmin have had the temerity to experience feelings of anger, sadness, frustration, and deep resentment, patriarchal society has denied them these feelings, and, in fact, punished them heartily for feeling anything at all.”
― Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia

“A matter, as the famous book intoned, of finding the shade of the parachute that best complemented you. But really: With no parachute at all you'd hit the pavement so hard it probably wouldn't even hurt, and you'd unleash a whole new color palate-bone, blood, muscle-in the process.”
― Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia

“But when Dahlia caught sight of The Book—It’s Up to You: The Cancer To-Do List—she was momentarily thrown off guard. It was slim and isolated, all by itself way over in Diseases (Other). It had a sort of amusing, harmless, captive dignity, like a Yorkie in a giant cage marked CAUTION.”
― Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia

“The Health and Body section was alphabetized by disease: AIDS, Allergies, Cancer, Diabetes, and Diseases (Other): Arthritis, Asthma, Eczema, Epilepsy, Fibromyalgia, Heart, Migraines, MS, Sleep Disorders. And then on into History of Medicine, Public Health, Medical Reference. Dahlia loved the word Heart listed in there, the way it stuck out from the others as a marker of things darker, more complex, and at once better and worse than anything else you might have wrong with you. Like having a heart at all—full, bloody, pumping, yearning—might just be the base problem. Within Cancer there were subdivisions: Breast, Ovarian, Prostate, Thyroid. The whole section was riddled with the telltale yellow and black spines of the For Dummies series. Prostate Cancer for Dummies, Ovarian Cancer for Dummies, Lung Cancer for Dummies. Did Dummies get a different kind of cancer altogether? If only.”
― Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia

“Watching movies (Titanic, Flirting with Disaster, Mannequin, Thelma and Louise, Rushmore, The Goonies, She’s Having a Baby, it mattered very little) was a kind of prayer: She knew the characters as well as she knew herself, as well as she knew anything there was to know, and she could chart and rechart their movements and secrets and misunderstandings endlessly, reflecting in any number of new permutations on all of it, each time. Again and again. They were acquaintances—people she’d known her whole life and understood well, people incapable of letting her down by changing or disappearing or offering up the unexpected. The League of Their Own tears were purely for catharsis. When she was done she would reemerge, reborn. She would make new mistakes. Or maybe none at all. Okay,”
― Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia