Quotes from Kim Edwards

We all have secrets. We've all kept secrets. We've had secrets kept from us, and we know how that feels.

It's kind of a mysterious process, but something will catch my attention, and I'll make a note about it. I may even write a few pages about it, and then I'll put it aside, but I'll sort of keep it in mind. Then as time goes on, other things will gather to it as if it's a magnet, almost, and eventually, there's enough to make the story.

My first job was in a nursing home - a terrible place in retrospect. It was in an old house, and the residents were so lonely. People rarely visited them. I only stayed there a couple of months, but it made a strong impression on me.

I swam across Skaneateles Lake, about a mile, when I was 11 years old. I remember feeling when I was in the middle of the lake that I would be there forever, and having no idea where on shore I'd end up. I made it, and I'm proud of the determination and persistence that took.

A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how.

Music is like you touch the pulse of the world. Music is always happening, and sometimes you get to touch it for a while, and when you do you know that everything's connetcted to everything else.

Short on money, long on hope

That there were other worlds, invisible, unknown, beyond imagination even, was a revelation to him.

He carried Paul inside and up the stairs. He gave him a drink of water and the orange chewable aspirin he like and sat with him on the bed, holding his hand...This was what he yearned to capture on film: these rare moments where the world seemed unified, coherent, everything contained in a single fleeting image. A spareness that held beauty and hope and motion - a kind of silvery poetry, just as the body was poetry in blood and flesh and bone.

That there were other worlds, invisible, unknown, beyond imagination even, was a revelation to him.

A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how.

So something had begun, and now she could not stop it. Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement. She could leave this place today. She could start a new life somewhere else.

He had never even glimpsed her.

bleak territory of the heart.

The challenges in this place are real and sometimes very difficult, but I've learned to slow down and look for beauty in my days, for the mysteries and blessings woven into everything, into the very words we speak.

Norah looked at her son's tiny face, surprised, as always, by his name. he had not grown into it yet, he still wore it like a wrist band, something that might easily slip off and disappear. She had read about people – where? she could not remember this either – who refused to name their children for several weeks, feeling them to be not yet of the earth, suspended still between two worlds.

The place was a familiar as breath but as far from his life now as the moon.

Once, this whole world had been hidden beneath a shallow sea.

This is what he knew that Paul didn't: the world was precarious and sometimes cruel. He'd had to fight hard to achieve what Paul simply took for granted.

Norah watched him, serious and utterly absorbed in his task, overcome by the simple fact of his existence.

She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.

He wished he had some kind of X-ray vision for the human heart.

They turned a distracted gaze on the world, wide-eyed, somehow, and questioning.

his discomfort seemed to soften her, for when he met her eyes again, they were kind.