38 quotes found
“Mothers tend toward right on most things.”
“The simplest falsehoods are the strongest.”
“You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing.”
“Because desperate people cling to hope like sailors to their wreaks.”
“That, my dear, is what makes a character interesting, their secrets.”
“How was a boy who'd tasted poverty ever expected to choose the poorer road?”
“She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation.”
“Some seasons later, the Princess of the kingdom was riding with her handmaiden on the edge of the dark woods. Though once she had been very ill, the Princess had recovered miraculously and was now ...”
“Hope, how she had grown to hate the word. It was an insideious seed planted inside a person's soul, surviving covertly on little tending, then flowering so spectacularly that none could help but ch...”
“Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it...”
“She'd slept terribly the night before. The room, the bed, were both comfortable enough, but she'd been plagued with strange dreams, the sort that lingered upon waking but slithered away from memory...”
“Every so often a reader tells me, somewhat disappointedly, that their family doesn't have any secrets. To which I always reply that of course it does, they just don't know them yet. For where there...”
“To abandon a child, she had once said to someone, when she thought Cassandra couldn't hear, was an act so cold, so careless, it refused forgiveness.”
“What she really felt like doing was reading. Escaping into the Enchanted Wood, up the Faraway Tree, or with the Famous Five into Smuggler's Top.”
“Will history remember us, I wonder? I do hope so - to imagine that one might do something, touch an event somehow, & thereby transcend the bounds of a single human lifetime!”
“That was the nature of history, of course: notional, partial, unknowable, a record made by the victors.”
“They'd fallen into an easy routine, the three of them. Breakfast together in the morning, then Hughie would leave for work and she and Nell would get started in the house. Lil found she liked havin...”
“But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960's.”
“Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?”
“As Linus grew into his teens, became even more awkward, with long, gangly arms and odd ginger hairs sprouting from his spotty chin, Georgiana blossomed into a beautiful child, beloved of all on the...”
“His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.”
“Then he led her to sit by him on a fallen gum trunk, smooth and white, and he leaned to whisper in her ear. Transferred the secret he and her mother had kept for seventeen years. Waited for the fli...”
“You'll beat this. I know it doesn't feel like it, but you will. You're a survivor.""I don't want to survive it.""I know that, too," Nell had said. "And it's fair enough. But sometimes we don't have...”
