Ann-Marie MacDonald · 848 pages
Rating: (11.5K votes)
“There are some stories you can't hear enough. They are the same every time you hear them. But you are not. That's one reliable way of understanding time.”
“Afterwards, in bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of smoke and peril, colour and serene delight. That is a journey no one can end with the change of a channel. Enduring magic.”
“Writing. Opening a vein in your wrist with a spoon.”
“As time went by, it mattered less and less that in 1969 a rocket went from Florida to the moon and men walked there. Good men. People's dads. Those were only events, scattered in time. Draw them close, rub them between thumb and finger till they look like larvae, soften like silk, distend to knot, to weave. It takes a village to kill a child.”
“She rejoins the crowd and watches with her friends, but she feels like an emptied glass - that crestfallen feeling of walking out from a movie theatre in the middle of the day, out from the intimate matinée darkness and the smell of popcorn, which is the smell of heightened colour and sound and story, into the borderless bright of day. Bereft.”
“Tell the story, gather the events, repeat them. Pattern is a matter of upkeep. Otherwise the weave relaxes back to threads picked up by birds to make their nests. Repeat, or the story will fall and all the king's horses and all the king's men. . . . Repeat, and cradle the pieces carefully, or events will scatter like marbles on a wooden floor.”
“Perhaps God dropped them on their heads before they were born.”
“Between a mother’s eyes and her son’s face, there is not air. There is something invisible and invincible. Even though—or because—he will go out into the world, she will never lose her passion to protect him.”
“You always run into something no matter where you go. Turns out you're someplace after all.”
“With the goodness of God to desire our highest welfare, the wisdom of God to plan it, and the power of God to achieve it, what do we lack? Surely we are the most favored of all creatures.”
“It’s worth taking a brief pause here to ponder what has happened. Using only Pythagoras’ theorem and Einstein’s assumption about the speed of light being the same for everyone, we derived a mathematical formula that allowed us to predict the lengthening of the lifetime of a subatomic particle called a muon when that muon is accelerated around a particle accelerator in Brookhaven to 99.94 percent of the speed of light. Our prediction was that it should live 29 times longer than a muon standing still, and this prediction agrees exactly with what was seen by the scientists at Brookhaven. The more you think about this, the more wonderful it is. Welcome to the world of physics!”
“...every time you make a decision to be less than what God wants for you, you're denying yourself some of God's blessings. It's up to you. You can live a life with God's blessings, or just exist with all the consequences of choosing wrong.”
“Entertainment’s chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise.”
“You can't do extraordinary things in the world if you're spending time criticizing others because they don't look or behave the way you think they should.”
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