Quotes from Kim Edwards

The year was 1922, and the Curies had transformed plain earth into something rare and unimagined. A secret of the universe has been revealed, and a restless world dreamed of transformation. [p. 205]

It shocked me, the strength of the image, the desire I had to see if it might happen this way- though I couldn't tell if it was really desire in the present or leftover from the past.

When he reached the desk he handed Caroline a photograph in a dark blue cardboard frame. It was a portrait, black and white, faintly tinted. The woman looking out wore a pale peach sweater. Her hair was gently waved, her eyes a deep shade of blue. Rupert Dean's wife, Emelda, dead now for twenty years. She was te love of my life, he announced to Caroline, his voice so loud that people looked up.

I just couldn't do it- break all the rules. Blow everything up. The world doesn't end, Bree said quietly. Amazing, but it really doesn't.

It's a party,' she repeated. 'You can either miss it and take pictures of it, or you can join get a drink and join it.

For the rest of his life, he realized, he would be torn like this, aware of Phoebe's awkwardness, the difficulties she encountered in the world simply by being different, and ye propelled beyond all this by her direct and guileless love. By her love, yes, and, he realized...by his own new and strangely uncomplicated love for her.

But you and I and Phoebe, 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.

It's a kind of power, isn't it, knowing a secret? But lately I don't like it so much, knowing this. It's not really mine to know, is it?

The love was within her all the time, and its only renewal came from giving it away.

her. After graduation she had worked for six months at the telephone company, a job she'd not enjoyed

For if the worst had already happened to them in the eyes of the world, then surely, surely, it was the worst that they left behind them now.

You're right, Norah, anything can happen, any time. But what goes wrong is not your fault. You can't spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won't work. You'll just end up missing the life you have.

But now she dreamed every night of lost things.

He liked that bones were solid things, surviving even the white heat of cremation. Bones would last; it was easy for him to put his faith in something so solid and predictable.

Water moves forever in a circle; someday, little ones, your grandchildren may even drink your tears

car. Remembering her kneeling the dirt, planting morning glory seeds.

Crocuses shouted purple and white against the bright grass;

Now that he was in school, he had his own life. He no longer liked to site and cuddle with her unless he was sick or wanted her to read him a story before bed.

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.   —Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers

she seemed not to worry very much about ghings, but rather to accept the world as a fascinating and unusual place where anything might happen memory keepers daugher

O mundo não acaba. É espantoso, mas na verdade não acaba.

E se for meia-noite? Porque não? Podem muito bem saltar o jantar , levantar os pratos e fazer amor na sala de jantar.!

She had read about people-where? she could not remember this either- who refused to name their children for several weeks, feeling them to not be yet of the earth, suspeded still between two worlds.

There was so much force and beauty in the windows, such unsettled sadness in what little I knew of Rose's life, all her longing, her distance from her daughter. Just knowing she had existed opened new and uneasy possibilities within my understanding of the story I'd always thought I'd known by heart. ... Whoever Rose had been, she was gone, unable to speak for herself, fading into the past as surely as these rainy colors were diffusing, even now [p. 142].