The Butterfly Garden Quotes

“Some people stay broken. Some pick up the pieces and put them back together with all the sharp edges showing.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“I think a trauma doesn’t stop just because you’ve been rescued.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“What choice are you making, Desmond?”
“I don’t think I’m making any choice right now.”
“Then you’re automatically making the wrong ones.” He straightened, mouth open to protest, but I held up my hand. “Not making a choice is a choice. Neutrality is a concept, not a fact. No one actually gets to live their lives that way.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“Not making a choice is a choice. Neutrality is a concept, not a fact.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“Beauty loses its meaning when you’re surrounded by too much of it.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“My secrets are old friends; I would feel like a poor friend if I abandoned them now.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“Listen to what isn’t being said.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“I’m not a fake person; I’m carefully and genuinely handcrafted.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“The trouble with sociopaths, really, is that you never know where they draw their boundaries.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“Some wanted the freedom to be anyone they wanted, some of us wanted the freedom to be left alone.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“And that stupid little girl stood in the winter and kept lighting matches to catch glimpses of families that weren’t—could never be—hers and froze to death in those harsh moments of reality between matches, because even though matches can burn, they’re light, not heat.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“Sometimes you can look at a wedding and realize with a certain sense of resignation that any children produced in that marriage will inevitably be fucked up and fucked over. It’s a fact, not a sense of foreboding so much as a grim acceptance that these two people should not—but definitely will—reproduce.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“You seem to have this strange image of me as a lost child, like I’ve just been thrown on the side of the road like garbage, or roadkill, but kids like me? We’re not lost. We may be the only ones who never are. We always know exactly where we are and where we can go. And where we can’t.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“If you don’t look at the bad thing, the bad thing can’t see you, right?”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“The gifts we give say as much about us as the gifts we get and keep,”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“If you’ve seen enough, you just look older, no matter what the rest of your face looks like.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“Let's call me a shadow child, overlooked rather than broken. I'm the teddy bear gathering dust bunnies under the bed, not the one-legged soldier.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“Our choices make us who we are,”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“So not only was I self-sufficient, I came to have a pretty low opinion of most people’s intelligence.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“What wasn’t known was created, what wasn’t created eventually ceased to matter.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“In terror she spoke, letting sink her wings till they trailed in the dust—in agony sobbed, letting sink her plumes till they trailed in the dust—till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust. But my wings couldn’t move and I couldn’t fly, and I couldn’t even cry. All that was left to me was the terror and the agony and the sorrow.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“The carousel’s over now,” he tells her quietly. “This time your family is waiting for you.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“She was incapable of insulting us, because the words have to have meaning to hurt.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“Like beauty, desperation and fear were as common as breathing.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“At night, the creature that was the Garden peeled back its synthetic skin to show the skeleton beneath.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“If you expect to be overlooked or forgotten, you’re always at least a little surprised when someone remembers you. You’re always outside understanding those strange creatures who actually expect people to remember and come back.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“and I thought how fucking unfair it was that he made us butterflies, of all things. Real butterflies could fly away, out of reach. The Gardener’s Butterflies could only ever fall, and that but rarely.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“It’s about the eyes, really. If you’ve seen enough, you just look older, no matter what the rest of your face looks like.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“Finding out about this . . . having it all come out . . . it would kill my mother.”

I shrugged. “Give it enough time and it’ll kill me too. Cowardice may be our natural state but it’s still a choice. Every day you know about the Garden and don’t call the police or let us go, you’re making that same choice again and again. It is what it is, Desmond. You just don’t get to pretend anymore.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“My name is Rachel,” she whispered against my skin. “Rachel Young. Will you remember?”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden