“every story - love or war - is a story about looking left when we should have been looking right.”
― Sarah Blake, quote from The Postmistress
“It is the story that lies around the edges of the photographs, or at the end of newspaper account. It's about the lies we tell others to protect them, and about the lies we tell ourselves in order not to acknowledge what we can't bear: that we are alive, for instance, and eating lunch, while bombs are falling, and refugees are crammed into camps, and the news comes toward us every hour of the day. And what, in the end, do we do?”
― Sarah Blake, quote from The Postmistress
“It began, as it often does, with a woman putting her ducks in a row.”
― Sarah Blake, quote from The Postmistress
“It gets you thinking about all the parts in a story we never see" --he cleared his throat-- "the parts around the edges. You bring someone like that boy so alive before us and there he is set loose in our world so that we can't stop thinking of him. But then the report is over, the boy disappears. He was just a boy in a story and we never know the ending, we never get to close the book. It makes you wonder what happens to the people in them after the story stops--all the stories you've reported for instance. Where are they all now?”
― Sarah Blake, quote from The Postmistress
“She imagined she could pull Time like taffy, stretching it longer and longer between her hands until the finest point had been reached, the point just before breaking, and she could live there. A point at the center of time with no going forward, no going back. Clasped in this way, without speaking, walking into no discernible ending, she could almost believe they tread on time.”
― Sarah Blake, quote from The Postmistress
“Some stories don't get told. Some stories you hold on to. To stand and watch and hold it in your arms was not cowardice. To look straight at the beast and feel its breath on your flanks and not to turn--one could carry the world that way.
They sat together, the four of them, a little longer, before Harry rose slowly to his feet. It was Thursday. It was the end of the afternoon. It was time to pick up and carry on to the other side of the day.”
― Sarah Blake, quote from The Postmistress
“We can't change what is coming. Something is always coming.”
― Sarah Blake, quote from The Postmistress
“Long ago, I believed that, given a choice, peple would turn to good as they would turn to light. I believed that reporting-honest, unflinching pictutes of the truth-could be a becon to lead us to deamand that worongs be righted, injustices puniches, and the weak and inncoent cared for. I must have believed, when I started out, that the shoulder of public opinion could be put up against the door of public indifference and would, when given the proper direction, shove it wide with the power of wanting to stand on the side of angel. (Frances Bard)”
― Sarah Blake, quote from The Postmistress
“Most people he knew, his wife included, wouldn't make it through an hour on the promise of four sentences. But Frankie Bard was like a camel. She could hold her words for days--as long as she could watch the goings-on.”
― Sarah Blake, quote from The Postmistress
“And one day I got it. I lifted my head from the child's chest I was listening to and realized, with a shock of relief: whatever is coming, comes. That's what holds it all together. We are all of us here in the mess. There's no way around it. And all that I am in the face of it is a single voice and a pair of hands...Anonymous but necessary. Vital.”
― Sarah Blake, quote from The Postmistress
“ONE DAY SOMEONE you saw every day was there and the next he was not. This was the only way Frankie had found to report the Blitz. The small policeman on the corner, the grocer with a bad eye, the people you walked to work with, in the shops, on the bus: the people you didn’t know but who walked the same route as you, who wove the anonymous fabric of your life. Buildings, gardens, the roofline, one could describe their absence. But for the disappearance of a man, or a little boy, or the woman who used to wait for the bus at the same time as she did, Frankie had found few words: Once they were here. And I saw them”
― Sarah Blake, quote from The Postmistress
“Like a stone tossed into a flock of birds, talk startled swiftly into flight whenever the new postmaster was mentioned.”
― Sarah Blake, quote from The Postmistress
“And then Frankie understood that the boy was going on alone. Perhaps there had been only one sponsor in another country for the child. There were many perhaps. But it was clear now that the mother was sending her son onward. ... She drew him to her and kissed him on one cheek and then the other cheek, so slowly, looking at every bit of his face, and then she reached and folded him to her. The train stopped with a jerk and went quiet. ...”
― Sarah Blake, quote from The Postmistress
“I am old. And tired of the terrible clarity of the young.”
― Sarah Blake, quote from The Postmistress
“Bombers flew above the wattles, over an England filled with songs of linnets and thrush. There were things being broken we had no American names for.”
― Sarah Blake, quote from The Postmistress
Sarah Blake
Born place: New York City, The United States
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“But as I aged I realized that I did it every day. My schoolmates and neighbors, my family members, my best friend and the boy I had a crush on, they all changed on a day-to-day basis. People changing skin became so normal to me that I no longer felt like change was horrifying. It was good to change what you were into something better. I even wanted that for myself.
Like androids, we humans change our bodies. Often, we do it so much that some of us are more machine than human, really? What makes me more worthy of experiencing a blue sky with voluptuous clouds than Meems? She has value. She's more valuable to society than I am at this point. Yet I still enjoy an aspect of society that she does not.”
― A.L. Davroe, quote from Nexis
“when my lips flew open I could only think of one thing. “You injected me with a virus!”
― Nikki Jefford, quote from Aurora Sky
“Lucas heard a strange sound, something he hadn’t heard in months. At first it didn’t seem real, it was something distant from the past. It was the first time in nearly a year he had heard himself laugh, and it momentarily stunned him”
― quote from The Edelweiss Express
“He’d just crossed a great river. His entire country had no permanent rivers, just wadis that flooded briefly with a rare passing shower and soon went dry again. America was such a rich country. That was probably the source of their arrogance, but his mission, and that of his three colleagues, was to take that arrogance down a few pegs. And that, Insh’Allah, they would do, in less than two more days.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from The Teeth of the Tiger
“Certainly sand was not suitable for life. Yet, was a stationary condition absolutely indispensable for existence? Didn't unpleasant competition arise precisely because one tried to cling to a fixed position? If one were to give up a fixed position and abandon oneself to the movement of the sands, competition would soon stop. Actually, in the deserts flowers bloomed and insects and other animals lived their lives. These creatures were able to escape competition through their great ability to adjust--for example, the man's beetle family.
While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
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