Helen Hooven Santmyer · 1184 pages
Rating: (11.3K votes)
“In a way, looking back, it seemed a long, long time since she had been eighteen, but in another way her memories were so clear and vivid that it seemed like yesterday. Time was an accordion, all the air squeezed out of it as you grew old. And how strange that in your mind you did not feel any older. You were the same person, but where had the years gone?”
“But surely, if you trust God, you can believe the bad moments pass, and the good memories are worth enough.”
“She was moved to a profound but pleasurable melancholy by the evidence that human life is brief and long survived by the material things it had believed itself to possess.”
“But Calvinists have never been pacifists: they have always been all too ready for a fight.”
“When we get presidents with brains it's purely by accident. Who was ever selected for his brains? We choose them for other qualities, or because they can be elected.”
“Barefooted on the slick brick walk I rushed to where I could breathe in the cool breath from the interior of the springhouse. On a cold bubbling spring, covered dishes and crocks and pitchers of milk and butter and so on floated in a circle in the mild whirlpool, like horses on a merry-go-round, in the water that smelled of the mint that grew close by.”
“How can the meek of the earth save themselves against the damnable evil which feeds on them?”
“Therapists are less likely to perceive a black woman as sad; instead they see her as angry or anxious.”
“Robert Phelps, a biographer of Colette, said about watching, 'Along with love and work, this is the third great salvation. For whenever someone is seriously watching, a form of lost innocence is restored. It will not last, but during those minutes his self-consciousness is relieved.' Noticing keeps you alive.”
“A man does what must be done,' Karl said, trying to concentrate on his board-making.
"But you never complain."
'What good would complaining do? A job takes so many hours of work, complaining will not shorten those hours.”
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