Quotes from Judy Blundell

Darling, I have a tip. Never, ever wait for a man.

I assume you're a refugee from the dance inside." "I escaped the enemy, captain," I said. I could see the side of his, and his smile. "Ah," he said. "At long last, a promotion.

Your enemies are not your enemies forever. Time passes. Things change. They suffer losses deeper than yours. And you realize they are as befuddled as you at the way life goes. Once, they acted badly, they took what they wanted without care. They are just like you, though. At three in the morning, they wander to a window. They stand watching the night sky, and they are afraid.

I was a girl crying in the middle of a crowd, and nobody noticed. Maybe there was something awful about that, but there was something good, too. I would dry my own tears. I opened my eyes and kept on walking. ~Kit

skeins of highway

helicopter blades purled the air

Maybe all relationships, friendship, partner, parent and child, were held together by the things you did not say as much as the things you did. The unsaid was the keystone in the arch. Once you kicked it free, you had nothing that held you up.

The world is full of places I haven't been.

Maybe paradise is overrated.

Being an adult--was this it? Doing the thing you most in your life didn't want to do, and doing it with a shrug?

Are you running away?" "No, not today.

We get our dreams told to us. Girls. Every day.

So here I was. I would live with Joe and Mom. I had no place else to go. Joe would carve the roast on Sundays. He would put up the Christmas tree.

Had the disappointments of middle age, the sorrow of a failed marriage, drained something out of her, what her father used to call her pep? Had she lost so much vitality that a young man could see right through her?

Summer was a forever season, and held no pain.

Mr. Grayson, we trusted that you and your wife were Gentiles.

When I stood up, my steps were uncertain, as though I were wearing lifts in my shoes. I could feel the air between the soles of my feet and the ground. It was like something important had altered, like gravity, or the air itself.

The sky was full of stacked gray clouds and the air tasted like a nickel.

Watch out for flying coconuts.

What surprised her the most about her quiet winter and spring was how often she thought of her mother. It was like discovering a new vein of grief. Maybe it was because mourning a marriage was like mourning a parent—you miss the person you wished you had, as well as the one you did.

Ruthie's story wasn't a love story, though, so this wasn't a beginning, or an end. It could be too late, no matter what Penny thought. No matter what she herself thought, or Joe thought, or how deeply they would fall. Whatever was going to happen could fall apart or melt away. It could be frost on a windowpane, dew on the grass. But stop, look, how beautiful is that.

I'm not usually a maniac. I don't really get angry. I just get sort of circular. Thinking, oh God, this is probably my fault for not doing whatever, and then, I don't know, I talk myself out of anger because it rarely gets the right results, does it? So it just sort of dissipates instead of getting expelled. I mean, not expelled in a school way, in a purgative way.

How did you learn how to do this, whittle the complex down to simple?

All along you could have done one thing. One thing simpler than al the rest. You could have told the truth about how you felt. Publicly. You could have stood up and said This is happening and it's wrong.