“The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you.”
― Amy Bloom, quote from Away
“Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.”
― Amy Bloom, quote from Away
“She believes in will. It is so frail and delicate at night that she can’t even imagine the next morning, but it is so wide and binding by the middle of the next day that she cannot even remember the terrible night. It is as if she gives birth every day.”
― Amy Bloom, quote from Away
“Surely, somewhere in the back of Bulfinch, in a part Lillian had not gotten to, there is an obscure (abstruse, arcane, shadowy, and even hidden) version of Proserpine in he Underworld in which a tired Jewish Ceres schleps through the outskirts of Tartarus, an ugly village of tired whores who must double as laundresses and barbers, a couple of saloons, a nearly empty five-and-dime, and people too poor to pull up stakes. In this version, Ceres looks all over town for her Proserpine, who crossed the River Cyane in a pretty sailboat with Pluto, having had the good sense to come to an understanding with the king early on. Pluto and Proserpine picnic in a charming park, twinkling lights overhead and handsome wide benches like the ones in Central Park. When Ceres comes, tripping a little on her hem as she walks through the soft grass, muttering and trying to yank Proserpine to her feet so they can start the long trip home to Enna and daylight (which has lost much of its luster, now that Proserpine is queen of all she surveys), the girl does not jump up at the sight of her mother, but takes her time handing out the sandwiches and pours cups of sweetened tea for the three of them. She lays a nicely ironed napkin in her lap and another in the lap of her new husband, the king. Proserpine does not eat the pomegranate seeds by mistake, or in a moment of desperate hunger, or fright, or misunderstanding. She takes the pomegranate slice out of her husband’s dark and glittering hand and pulls the seeds into her open, laughing mouth; she eats only six seeds because her mother knocks it out of her hand before she can swallow the whole sparkling red cluster.
“We have to get home,” Ceres says.
“I am home,” her daughter says.”
― Amy Bloom, quote from Away
“But in the morning everything can, and must, be seen. Daylight takes us; it peels us like fruit.”
― Amy Bloom, quote from Away
“Literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.”
― Amy Bloom, quote from Away
“[...] und sie hört, wie er sich in sein Doppelbett legt, auf seine Seite, da er nicht auf Helens Seite schlafen kann, wo er heimlich drei ihrer bestickten Kissen arrangiert hat und sich zum Schlafen ihnen zuwendet, ein Arm um das mittlere Kissen gelegt, den anderen unter dem Kopf, wobei seine Hand wie zum Schutz auf seiner Stirn ruht.”
― Amy Bloom, quote from Away
“Eviction," Frieda said. "You can't pay, you can't stay." She said in Yiddish, "Es iz shver tzu makhen a leben." It's hard to make a living.”
― Amy Bloom, quote from Away
“...as he cannot sleep on Helen's side, which is where he has secretly arranged three of her embroidered pillows, and sleeps facing them, one arm around the middle pillow, the other curled under his head, his hand resting on his brow as if for protection.”
― Amy Bloom, quote from Away
Amy Bloom
Born place: in The United States
Born date January 1, 1953
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“I am a lifetime practitioner of secretive eating, after all. As a kid who entered an empty house after school each day, I felt a desperation to eat. I knew no way other than eating to alleviate the loneliness, to fill in the spaces where comfort and security could have been. Food poured over the millions of cracks in the foundation of my family; it seeped into the fissures; it narrowed the chasms.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along
“white-suited figures were making their way around the site like phantoms. The scene-of-crime officers had arrived. They would establish an inner cordon around the body and an outer one around the crime scene.”
― Sharon J. Bolton, quote from Now You See Me
“American culture in particular has instilled in us the bizarre notion that to ask for help amounts to an admission of failure. But some of the most powerful, successful, admired people in the world seem, to me, to have something in common: they ask constantly, creatively, compassionately, and gracefully. And to be sure: when you ask, there’s always the possibility of a no on the other side of the request. If we don’t allow for that no, we’re not actually asking, we’re either begging or demanding. But it is the fear of the no that keeps so many of our mouths sewn tightly shut.”
― Amanda Palmer, quote from The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
“Her wings were folded, and her scales shimmered like white gold against the red backdrop. Blaze”
― Tui T. Sutherland, quote from The Hidden Kingdom
“Only as I approached adulthood did I realize that life is a process of continual becoming.”
― quote from Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman
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The Seven Daughters...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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