Quotes from Kim Edwards

Think of it, Dad. What if I have it in me to do that, and I don't try?

Grief, it seemed, was a physical place.

The interwoven spheres and vines ran along the bottom. I'd done some research, and I'd found this motif everywhere. These overlapping circles were ancient, tracing back to Pythagorean geometry--geometry, a measure of the world. In more mystical terms, the shape had always evoked tghe place where world overlap: dreaming with waking, death with life, the visible with the unseen. [p. 362]

I don't see how sucking the joy out of every aspect of life can be pleasing to anybody's God

They can learn- they must learn- to appreciate the history of their good fortune through the experiences of those who not only witnessed history, but made it.

Paul, careening down the slide with his arms out flung, and Phoebe, present somehow through her absence.

i have found that if you love your life .. Life will love you back .! :)

Writing is always a process of discovery - I never know the end,or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There is a constant interplay between the imagining and shaping of the story.

A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different

I imagine that she flushes, seeing him there, for she is at that age when even the most commonplace boys take on a sense of mystery. And this boy is not ordinary. He is wild and he has strange and fanciful perceptions. [p. 153]

Sometimes loneliness is an emergency situation

Do what you love, and the money will follow.

we have a choice. To be bitter and angry, or to try and move on. It's the hardest thing for me, letting go of all that righteous anger. I'm still struggling. But that's what I want to do.

There was in the mountains, and perhaps in the world at large, a theory of compensation that held that for everything given something else was immediately and visibly lost. Well, you've got the smarts even if your cousin did get the looks. Compliments, seductive as flowers, thorny with their opposites: Yes, you may be smart but you sure are ugly; You may look nice but you didn't get a brain. Compensation; balance in the universe.

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

It's my fault too. For a long time, I wanted to be rescued, I realized that. But not anymore. You don't have to protect me all the time now.

You couldn't blame him, no, you couldn't fault him for wanting to go deeper into every fleeting moment, to study its mystery.

Why did she [Madame Curie] seek to tame this mystery, which in the hands of others turned a multitude to ashes? Her work exploded with the violence of a thousand suns, but I must tell her that it was not her fault, the way they twisted her creation, tampered with her dreams. I will tell her. They said she was inhuman, heartless, but it is not so. She is here now. Weeping, she awaits me, She is carrying balm for our hands. [p, 56]

I hate that more than anything—being part of a cliché.

A film closed over the past as she spoke, a barrier as brittle and fragile as ice forming. It would grow and strengthen. It would become impenetrable, opaque.

she had only made things worse. His angry eyes met hers in the mirror, and she remembered his soft plump infant hand pressed against her cheek, his laughter trilling through the rooms. Another boy altogether, that child. Where had he gone?

The world beyond the water was a blue of green and stone and blue. A moment later Yoshi pushed through, the water pouring down in sheets so smooth it looked like glass, and stepped into the calm [p. 296]

It's always like this after a few days here. I start to lose my bearings. The surface is one way, but then there are all these other things going on, sometimes going back decades, swirling undercurrents that I just don't understand. [p. 336]

I wondered if I could call my experience in the chapel prayer--not a long list of asking, after all, or a rote string of words, but rather a kind of sacred listening. [p, 355]