Quotes from The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Kim Edwards ·  401 pages

Rating: (518.2K votes)


“Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“You can't stop time. You can't capture light. You can only turn your face up and let it rain down.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“A moment might be a thousand different things.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter



“Either things grow and change or they die.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“It seemed there was no end at all to the lies a person could tell, once she got started.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“You can't spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won't work. You'll just end up missing the life you have.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“His love for her was so deeply woven with resentment that he could not untangle the two.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“Lately, the world felt fragile, like a blown egg, as if it might shatter beneath a careless touch.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter



“She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“He'd kept this silence because his own secrets were darker, more hidden, and because he believed that his secrets had created hers.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“Music is like you touch the pulse of the world. Music is always happening, and sometimes you get to touch it for a while, and when you do you know that everything's connetcted to everything else.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“...so young, so lonely and naive, that she imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasn't like that. The love was within her all the time and its only renewal came from giving it away.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“After all these years, I feel so free. Who knows where I might fly?”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter



“It's good to be in love.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“No one could suspect the intricate mysteries of her heart.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“...and the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“In some deep place in her heart, Caroline had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry had once known her as no one else ever could. But it was not true. He had never even glimpsed her.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“She imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasn't like that. The love was within her all the time, and its only renewal came from giving it away.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter



“Anything can happen. But what goes wrong isn’t your fault. You can’t spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won’t work. You’ll just end up missing the life you have.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“The thing is, I used to like that: feeling special because I knew something no one else did. It's a kind of power, isn't it, knowing a secret? But lately I don't like it so much, knowing this. It's not really mine to know, is it?”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“Away from the bright motion of the party, she carried her sadness like a dark stone clenched in her palm.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“He carried Paul inside and up the stairs. He gave him a drink of water and the orange chewable aspirin he like and sat with him on the bed, holding his hand...This was what he yearned to capture on film: these rare moments where the world seemed unified, coherent, everything contained in a single fleeting image. A spareness that held beauty and hope and motion - a kind of silvery poetry, just as the body was poetry in blood and flesh and bone.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter



“On an impulse he went into the room and stood before the window, pushing aside the sheer curtain to watch the snow, now nearly eight inches high on the lampposts and the fences and the roofs. It was the sort of storm that rarely happened in Lexington, and the steady white flakes, the silence, filled him with a sense of excitement and peace. It was a moment when all the disparate shards of his life seemed to knit themselves together, every past sadness and disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty hidden now beneath the soft white layers. Tomorrow would be quiet, the world subdued and fragile, until the neighborhood children came out to break the stillness with their tracks and shouts and joy. He remembered such days from his own childhood in the mountains, rare moments of escape when he went into the woods, his breathing amplified and his voice somehow muffled by the heavy snow that bent branches low, drifted over paths. The world, for a few short hours, transformed.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“What would happen, they conjectured, if they simply went on assuming their children would do everything. Perhaps not quickly. Perhaps not by the book. But what if they simply erased those growth and development charts, with their precise, constricting points and curves? What if they kept their expectations but erased the time line? What harm could it do? Why not try?”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“Her voice, high and clear, moved through the leaves, through the sunlight. It splashed onto the gravel, the grass. He imagined the notes falling into the air like stones into water, rippling the invisible surface of the world. Waves of sound, waves of light: his father had tried to pin everything down, but the world was fluid and could not be contained.”
― Kim Edwards, quote from The Memory Keeper's Daughter



About the author

Kim Edwards
Born place: in The United States
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Popular quotes

“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche


“Women, for their part, are always complaining that we raise them only to be vain and coquettish, that we keep them amused with trifles so that we may more easily remain their masters; they blame us for the faults we attribute to them. What stupidity! And since when is it men who concern themselves with the education of girls? Who is preventing the mothers from raising them as they please? There are no schools for girls—what a tragedy! Would God, there were none for boys! They would be raised more sensibly and more straightforwardly. Is anyone forcing your daughters to waste their time on foolish trifles? Are they forced against their will to spend half their lives on their appearance, following your example? Are you prevented from instructing them, or having them instructed according to your wishes? Is it our fault if they please us when they are beautiful, if their airs and graces seduce us, if the art they learn from you attracts and flatters us, if we like to see them tastefully attired, if we let them display at leisure the weapons with which they subjugate us? Well then, decide to raise them like men; the men will gladly agree; the more women want to resemble them, the less women will govern them, and then men will truly be the masters.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, quote from Emile or On Education


“Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.”
― quote from Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem


“We, as human beings, enjoy freedom of choice.

Your attitude is your choice!”
― Lorii Myers, quote from Targeting Success, Develop the Right Business Attitude to be Successful in the Workplace


“Jeremy fixed her with a dark look, full of reproach. A hot blush singed the tips of her opal-adorned ears. For a moment, Lucy felt as though she were sitting in the breakfast room wearing only her nightgown—or less. But if he meant to shame her, he would be sorely disappointed. Her lips tingled, and she slowly wet them with her tongue before flashing him a bold grin. He quickly looked away.
Oh, what fun it was to vex him. He made it so easy to do. Hunting and fishing were all welland good, but truly, Jemmy-baiting had always been her favorite autumn sport. Lucy viewedhis staid countenance as an unending challenge. A smooth, thick-shelled egg that begged to be cracked. Any rearrangement of his features constituted a victory, be it a wince, a scowl, or that rarest of expressions—a smile. A smile that showed teeth counted double.Last night had shown her an entirely new way to bedevil Jeremy Trescott. Not with girlish pranks, but with womanly wiles. Oh, yes. She

d cracked the egg last night, but good. Hisexpression of befuddled desire was far more amusing than a wince or a scowl, or even asmile that showed teeth. That last kiss had to count at least ten.She lifted her cup of chocolate to her lips. Closing her eyes, she pressed her tongue againstthe cool china rim, remembering the power of a proper kiss. Drinking in the hot, sweetrichness, feeling delicious warmth spread down her throat and pool in her belly. And lower.She sighed into the cup. If Jeremy

s kiss could rival chocolate, Lucy shivered to imaginehow it would be to kiss—”
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