The House at Riverton

It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down....

I sound contemptuous, but I am not. I am interested--intrigued even--by the way time erases real lives, leaving only vague imprints. Blood and spirit fade away so that only names and dates remain.

The girl in the mirror caught my eye briefly...It is an uncanny feeling, that rare occasion when one catches a glimpse of oneself in repose. An unguarded moment, stripped of artifice, when one forgets to fool even oneself.

Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternate version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces.

... for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.

Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.

Only people unhappy in the present seek to know the future.

She doesn't know I cry for the changing times. That just as I reread favourite books, some small part of me hoping for a different ending, I find myself hoping against hope that the war will never come. That this time, somehow, it will leave us be.

If you don't stop apologizing, you're going to convince me you've done something wrong.

. . . happiness grows at our own firesides, . . . . It is not to be picked in strangers' gardens.

Better to lose oneself in action than to wither in despair.

True love, it's like an illness. I never understood it before. In books and plays. Poems. I never understood what drove otherwise intelligent, right-thinking people to do such extravagant, irrational things. Now I do. It's an illness. You can catch it when you least expect. There's no known cure. And sometimes, in its most extreme, it's fatal.

I want to know how it feels to be altered by life

She's one of the few people able to look beyond the lines on my face to see the twenty-year-old who lives inside.

There were two now where they had been three. David's death had dismantled the triangle, and an enclosed space was now open. Two points are unreliable; with nothing to anchor them, there is nothing to stop them drifting in opposite directions. If it is string that binds, it will eventually snap and the points will separate; if elastic, they will continue to part, further and further, until the strain reaches its limit and they are pulled back with such speed that they cannot help but collide with devastating force.

While I wasn't certain how I felt about spiritualists, I was certain enough about the type of people who were drawn to them. Only people unhappy in the present seek to know the future.

In real life turning points are sneaky. They pass by unlabeled and unheeded. Opportunities are missed, catastrophes unwittingly celebrated. Turning points are only uncovered later, by historians who seek to bring order to a lifetime of tangled moments.

But in my humble opinion, a house needs a good party once in a while; remind folks it exists.

I want to be independent. To meet interesting people. ... I just mean new people with clever things to say. Things I've never heard before. I want to be free. Open to whatever adventure comes along and sweeps me off my feet.

But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.

It hardly needs to be said: sooner or later secrets have a way of making themselves known.

But happiness ... happiness grows at our own firesides,' she said. 'It is not to be picked in strangers' gardens.

It is a universal truth that no matter how well one knows a scene, to observe it from above is something of a revelation.

But of course, those who live in memories are never really dead

It's special, grandparents and grandchldren. So much simpler. Is it always so, I wonder? I think perhaps it is. While one's child takes a part of one's heart to use and misuse as they please, a grandchild is different. Gone are the bonds of guilt and responsibility that burden the maternal relationship. The way to love is free.

I am beginning to feel at home in the past and a visitor to this strange and blanched experience we agree to call the present

I've heard it said that children born to stressful times never shake the air of woe . . . .

Reluctance to begin is quick to befriend procrastination. . . .

Creatures that grow up in the wilderness turn out wild.