Quotes from Carrie Brown

Tenderness fills her. Here it is, the moon that has followed her everywhere through her childhood ... Here is the moon —dear, distant companion—yet now intimately near and patient.

But now it is Norris's privilege and pleasure to see her as no one else does, for he has been struck by love for Vida. And in his eyes, under the transforming inspection of his gaze?well, who can tell? Vida may become something more than she appears at the very moment, waiting quietly on her bench, the world breathing delicately around her.

How horribly easy it is, he thinks now, breathing hard, watching the light retreat down the lane, to go from good to bad, from the dream to the memory, from what we want to all we've ever had.

England, with its upsetting history of colonialism. It never did seem quite right to Norris, the British being so utterly British no matter where they were. One ought to adapt, he believes. One ought to accommodate. Change, after all, is the great elixir of life.

The moon bobs at the window, full and bright, and she is drawn to the French doors to look out upon the sight. It still seems unfathomable to her that American astronauts have now set their feet on the moon, though she is struck by how quickly something that was once considered impossible can pass over into the realm of the accomplished.

Once, she believed that she was only waiting for something to happen to her. And yet now it seems that something has begun around her. The thing she has been waiting for?though she cannot say what it is?has started making itself felt in the very air around her. She does not know how to behave, she realizes, nor what to expect. She does not even know anymore what to hope for.

Through his stamps he had become an eager and gregarious armchair traveler, a man with a spyglass at the window, even a raconteur. But he wouldn't ever really go anywhere, would he? It isn't in him to leave. It's the fact of the village behind him, its Norman stones and ancient mortar, its know quantities?this is what sets him free. For him, at least, just imagining the world is quite enough, as much as he can bear, in fact.

It has taken her twenty years to learn what she is made of. And that modesty has made her what she was always destined to become, the heroine of her own tale?the woman who will be at last, before it is too late, the great love of one man's life and the salvation of her own.

So that's all right then, isn't it?" she said. "If you can't go there with them, the best you can do is to be there when they get back." She reached over and touched his cheek. "We all suffer something, don't we?" she said. "Some of us just go down harder than others.

He is also, not surprisingly, a philatelist, a collector and admirer of stamps.

And that the waters had receded in less than two days, a breathtaking reversal, leaving the town choked with rust and mud, seemed to him a perfect demonstration of the brutality of destruction—it can all happen in a second, he had thought; they might not even have known it was coming.

People came to understand one another not by words but by what had happened between them. It couldn't be said, in so many words.

What do we know of ourselves except as through a prism, he wonders, the endless refractions of our mind turning back on itself like a dog chasing its own tail?

You could see that it only wanted some attention to be beautiful again.

I)t is in curiosity, first, and then in knowledge and reflection that freedom rests.

And each time she did, he would cry the way he had cried at his wife's funeral, understanding at last that grief is not accountable, that it lives wherever it chooses, and that the worst thing is this: after the first time, one always has the memory of it.