Barbara Kingsolver · 245 pages
Rating: (5.9K votes)
“Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.”
“As I looked at her there among the pumpkins I was overcome with the color and the intesity of my life. In these moments we are driven to try and hoard happiness by taking photographs, but I know better. The improtant thing was what the colors stood for, the taste of hard apples and the existence of Lena and the exact quality of the sun on the last warm day in October. A photograph would have flattened the scene into a happy moment, whereas what I felt was rapture. The fleeting certainty that I deserved this space I'd been taking up on this earth, and all the air I had breathed.”
“Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.”
“It's frightening, she thinks, how when the going gets rough you fall back on whatever awful think you grew up with.”
“Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.”
“She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.”
“Sometimes that happens. Children can be your heartache. But that doesn’t matter, you have to go on and have them,” she said. “It works out.”
“It's a relief to share the uncomplicated affection that has passed between people and their dogs for thousands of years.”
“Over the phone, her laughter sounded like a warm bath.”
“I loved the time spent with him, but felt in some other chamber of my heart that it was time wasted. That I ought to be doing something else while there was time.”
“I don't know," Magda says, "Seems like that's just how it is with you and me. We're like islands on the moon.”
“Now Sam and Noelle were dead and I was about to lost my grandpa, and I knew I would never have that everything's-right-in-my-world feeling again.”
“Have only this consolation--that he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past was his undoing. He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him.”
“Dear Habicht, / Such a solemn air of silence has descended between us that I almost feel as if I am committing a sacrilege when I break it now with some inconsequential babble... / What are you up to, you frozen whale, you smoked, dried, canned piece of soul...?”
“13084
Tonight I came back to the hotel alone; the other has decided to return later on. The anxieties are already here, like the poison already prepared (jealousy, abandonment, restlessness); they merely wait for a little time to pass in order to be able to declare themselves with some propriety. I pick up a book and take a sleeping pill, "calmly." The silence of this huge hotel is echoing, indifferent, idiotic (faint murmur of draining bathtubs); the furniture and the lamps are stupid; nothing friendly that might warm ("I'm cold, let's go back to Paris). Anxiety mounts; I observe its progress, like Socrates chatting (as I am reading) and feeling the cold of the hemlock rising in his body; I hear it identify itself moving up, like an inexorable figure, against the background of the things that are here.”
“That’s what it comes down to.” Elizabeth worked the last few buttons together. She stopped to cough, but only for a moment. “He alone knows the number of our days, and until that moment, he always has a plan for us.”
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