“I’ll never understand why some people can’t just let others live their lives, you know,” Danial said. “You don’t have to understand. You don’t have to agree. Just leave people alone. When I look at the moon and planets and stars, all that narrow-mindedness and hate seem so petty. The universe is such a big place. One hundred thousand light years just from one end of the Milky Way to the other. One hundred. Thousand. Light years. In the time it’s taken for light to travel from one end of our galaxy to the other, thousands of generations have passed. It really makes you realize how small we are, doesn’t it? How short our time on earth is.”
― J.H. Trumble, quote from Don't Let Me Go
“Our nights were filled with passion and long soft gazes and sweet words. We weren't behaving ourselves, and we didn't for one moment feel guilty about that.”
― J.H. Trumble, quote from Don't Let Me Go
“It's still not perfect, and maybe perfection isn't all it's cut out to be anyway. But it's good. It's really good. They say you can't always get what you want. But sometimes you can, and you do, even when you don't deserve it.”
― J.H. Trumble, quote from Don't Let Me Go
“But surely even heroes weary lugging around the burdens of their heroism.”
― J.H. Trumble, quote from Don't Let Me Go
“[Love]...that sick kind of wanting that rips at your soul while making you look like some kind of psycho to the rest of the world.”
― J.H. Trumble, quote from Don't Let Me Go
“Adam, don’t do this.” He turned back and shoved me hard in the chest. “I didn’t do this, Nate,” he shouted in my face. “YOU DID.” His face contorted. He was trying not to cry, and failing. “You did!” His voice broke and he turned again.”
― J.H. Trumble, quote from Don't Let Me Go
“Nate?”
“Luke?”
He smiled at that. “Do you believe in love at first sight?”
I didn’t answer. Because I did. And this wasn’t it.”
― J.H. Trumble, quote from Don't Let Me Go
“All our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed; perhaps we all have the certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is to know.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from Collected Fictions
“He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome
“We're like mysteries to one another. Maybe if I can solve him and he can solve me, we can explain each other. Maybe that's what I need. Someone to explain me.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility
“He was sitting not far away, watching me, and I surprised a smile on his face, the first real smile I had ever seen him give, a smile that curved and softened the tight mouth, and warmed the ice-cool eyes; a smile that brought the blood to my face and made my heart turn over.”
― Juliet Marillier, quote from Daughter of the Forest
“we all make vows, Jimmy. And there is something very beautiful and touching and noble about wanting good impulses to be permanent and true forever," she said. "Most of us stand up and vow to love, honor and cherish someone. And we truly mean it, at the time. But two or twelve or twenty years down the road, the lawyers are negotiating the property settlement."
"You and George didn't go back on your promises."
She laughed. "Lemme tell ya something, sweetface. I have been married at least four times, to four different men." She watched him chew that over for a moment before continuing, "They've all been named George Edwards but, believe me, the man who is waiting for me down the hall is a whole lot different animal from the boy I married, back before there was dirt. Oh, there are continuities. He has always been fun and he has never been able to budget his time properly and - well, the rest is none of your business."
"But people change," he said quietly.
"Precisely. People change. Cultures change. Empires rise and fall. Shit. Geology changes! Every ten years or so, George and I have faced the fact that we have changed and we've had to decide if it makes sense to create a new marriage between these two new people." She flopped back against her chair. "Which is why vows are such a tricky business. Because nothing stays the same forever. Okay. Okay! I'm figuring something out now." She sat up straight, eyes focused somewhere outside the room, and Jimmy realized that even Anne didn't have all the answers and that was either the most comforting thing he'd learned in a long time or the most discouraging. "Maybe because so few of us would be able to give up something so fundamental for something so abstract, we protect ourselves from the nobility of a priest's vows by jeering at him when he can't live up to them, always and forever." She shivered and slumped suddenly, "But, Jimmy! What unnatural words. Always and forever! Those aren't human words, Jim. Not even stones are always and forever.”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from The Sparrow
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