Quotes from Elizabeth Brundage

I often ask the question: Is it impossible to have a simple life? The world is not simple, Claire said. The world is not simple. Joe repeated the phrase like the line of a great poem.

People wanted to be redeemed, she thought. Everyone did. We're only human.

Her mother had told her that when she was a girl. Whenever you're in trouble, just remember you're your own best friend.

People just want to be happy, she thought.

Whenever he was around, she'd get this look on her face, this kind of radiance. She was a beer poured too fast, her golden liquid spilling over the edge.

By the way, I've decided there's no such thing as a simple life. It's futile to even pursue one.

It was early still, the sky white, nude.

You couldn't teach kindness, she thought. It was something you were born with. People either had it or they didn't.

It's hard to see what's good, what's right, when you're in the middle of it.

The soul sees what the eye cannot

Inness painted from memory, which is to say that he didn't paint what he saw, but what he remembered. There's a difference. He believed memory was a lens to the soul. It's not the details that matter - the veins on a leaf, say- so much as the implied detail, such as the changing light, the wind, the lone peasant in the distance the sense that something else is going on, some deeper possibilitly ....

Beauty depends on the unseen, George quoted the artist, the visible upon the invisible.