28 quotes found
“To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.”
“The view, though. The view. It is undeniably exhilarating.”
“Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.”
“Everyday, there are choices to make and sometimes you make a selfish one.”
“And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.”
“I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.”
“The difficulty lay with the mind accommodating itself to the notion of the plane, with all its weight, defying gravity, staying aloft. She understood the aerodynamics of flight, could comprehend th...”
“You have to do what your heart dictates," Vivian says. "Do you believe that?""Not sure, actually. It's always annoyingly inconvenient, isn't it, the thing about the heart?”
“And she thought then how strange it was that disasterthe sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the facecould be at...”
“A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go. Falling in love can do that, you think. And so can a wild party. You marvel at the way each has the power to fo...”
“Sydney discovers that she minds the loss of her mourning. When she grieved, she felt herself to be intimately connected to Daniel. But with each passing day, he floats away from her. When she think...”
“A person walks into a room and says hello, and your life takes a course for which you are not prepared. It's a tiny moment (almost-but not quite-unremarkable), the beginning of a hundred thousand t...”
“Once you tell your first lie, the first time you lie for him, you are in it with him, and then you are lost.”
“Olympia thinks often about desire - desire that stops the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence - and how it may upend a life and threaten to dissolve the soul.”
“Poverty, her mother has written, makes you clever, and Honora knows that this is true.”
“One day a man has a job, and life is full of possibilities. The next day the job and the car are gone, and the man cannot look his wife in the eye.”
“And yet. And yet. If asked - if pressed - Honora would have to say she is strangely content. It's an odd feeling that she cannot describe to anyone - not to her mother and certainly not to Sexton, ...”
“Night would settle in like slow blindness, sucking the color from the trees and the low sky and the rocks and the frozen grass and the frost white hydrangeas until there was nothing left in the win...”
“The things that don't happen to us that we'll never know didn't happen to us. The nonstories. The extra minute to find the briefcase that makes you late to the spot where a tractor trailer mauled a...”
“And this all causes her to wonder at the disparity between the silk dresses and the natural postures of the body, and to think: How far, HOW FAR, we are willing to go to pretend we are not of the b...”