“Everything was temporary; she understood that now. All of this was temporary. It would all be snatched away. It was all on loan. Even the people we love. They were all on loan. One day you see their face across a rickety table or you pass them hurrying from here to there, or you see them leave you in your bed, and their profile passes you by...and you don't know...your thoughts somewhere else. And then they are snatched away forever and you did not know to say goodbye. You did not know.”
“But then it came to her…just change your mind about it. About everything. Shit. That was it. "What an idiot she was. It was that simple. Just decide to stop struggling and embrace it all as a gift. And in a single second, everything is different.”
“Life’s going to do that to you missy. Gonna upset your wagon, not just once but many times. And you got to choose who’s sitting next to you. Someone you can trust…or not.”
“Friendship, true friendship is a curious dance. Why does one recognize and embrace one soul and yet not another. What is that? That something unspoken. Perhaps it is a long ago remembrance of another time, another place, those same familiar eyes shining out. Always we are searching for those recognizable eyes…so that we might at last be recognized ourselves.”
“That the woman in her had died in anguish and a vengeful man had been born in her place apparently brooked no notice of the universe. Nor had the universe even blinked in the absorption into itself of her tragedy.”
“Here’s to being single…drinking doubles…and seeing triple!”
“reminded me of a quote by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—“life is infinitely stranger than anything the mind could invent.”
“as Shakespeare wrote, “What a piece of work is a man…”
“read aloud from Emerson: Be true to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, “Always do what you are afraid to do.” A simple manly character need never make an a-po-lo-gy…”
“It’s true that we’re all children disguised as adults…When age and illness embrace our body…when disease and pain overcome, our eternal youth within begins raging, stamping, praying. Please dear God who lays me down to sleep…an awful mistake has been made…I was just now learning to feel safe beneath this fragile skin, trust within this prison cell. Just now my eyes are open to the world…Just now I feel the earth beneath my feet.”
“It was so strange, she thought, these moments we pray for; they happen so quick and then they’re gone. “Just like that,” Charley said out loud.”
“First class passengers, stay where you are,” she yelled. “Second class, get out and walk. Third class, get down and push.”
“They came to a bend in the road where it turned more west than north, and there at the turn was a squat fir tree that for the last quarter mile Hadrian had suspected might be a bear.
Coincidentally, at the same time as they passed the tree, Hadrian finally reached the conclusion that Arcadius was senile. The man was old to be sure. Older than anyone he’d ever met. Older even than his father, who at the time of his departure was the oldest man in Hintindar-though everyone said he carried his age well. The professor didn’t carry his age well at all, and old folks sometimes went batty. One didn’t even need to be that old. Hadrian knew a warlord in the Gur Em who spoke of himself as if he were another person in the room. Sometimes he got in arguments to the point of refusing to speak to himself anymore and insisted others relay messages “to that idiot.” And the warlord was nowhere near Arcadius’s age. The best that could be said for Arcadius was that he carried his insanity well. So well in fact that it took Hadrian all the way to the bear tree to conclude the professor was crazy.
He had to be. There was just no sense in asking him to pair up with Royce.”
“If certain individuals fall in love from motives of convenience, they can be contrasted with plenty of others in whom passion seems principally aroused by the intensity of administrative difficulties in procuring its satisfaction.”
“I want to teach him his prayers and his letters and his manners. I want him for my own. Not just because he is motherless, but because I am childless and I want someone to love.”
“Wiktor almost smiled. His suspicions were”
“Even a child could see the division between what the Galileans [i.e., Christians] say they believe and what, in fact, they do believe, as demonstrated by their actions. A religion of brotherhood and mildness which daily murders those who disagree with its doctrines can only be thought hypocrite, or worse.”
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