Quotes from Sarah Blake

every story - love or war - is a story about looking left when we should have been looking right.

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?

Sand was dribbling out of the bag of her attention, faster and faster.

It began, as it often does, with a woman putting her ducks in a row.

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.

We can't change what is coming. Something is always coming.

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.

A woman will be loved...in proportion as she makes those around her happy...

A life can change in a single moment, and from there you simply move forward.

Because people are people. Evie fixed her eyes on him. People have complicated lives. Lives that don't necessarily fall so cleanly into black-and-white choices - people are blind, but still well-intended, and see as far as they can.

Wars, plagues, names upon tombs tell us only what happened. But history lies in the cracks in between. In the inexplicable, invisible turns and decisions. A person saying no instead of yes. …It is not that they had lived…but how.

And why just then, why that moment was the moment in which she understood quite suddenly her own death, she couldn't say. Simply, she saw how he would miss her.

every life had at its center a beginning that was not birth, a moment when the catch on the lock in one's life opens, and out it comes, starting forward.

But it is a mistake to think news happens somewhere else. To others. The news is always about you.

There is the crime and there is silence.

But it is a mistake to think news happens somewhere else. To others. The news is always about you. You must simply fit yourself in it. You must see how—you must be vigilant.

matter how well you take care of the dying, no matter if you sit beside them every minute, every day—in the end they must go, and you stay.

No matter how well you take care of the dying, no matter if you sit beside them every minute, every day—in the end they must go, and you stay. And you wave them off. You lie.

All love stories beget ghost stories.

Time and quiet, everyone counseled, would help. Best not to mention it. Best not to dwell on it, his mother had said. It was a terrible accident. It must have been hot. Windows were open at the time. And time would heal. Somethings were better left unsaid.

Metaphor, Evie thought as she stepped off the curb as the light changed, was for the young. Or, at any rate, for the younger than she.

Before the Holocaust," Paul was explaining to Daryl now, "when someone tripped on a paving stone in the road, the folk saying went, A Jew must be buried there. So the stumble stones take the old folk saying

And Evie was the grown-up now. She was in the line of grown-ups behind the child.

I am old. And tired of the terrible clarity of the young.