Quotes About Reflection

Do you think, Daniel," she said to him, rolling over onto her back so that she was able to look out of the window while she spoke, "that we might have reached the end of our story?

He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place. He will sit in a room in body, but in his head he is somewhere else, someone else, in a place known only to him.

He takes them in his hands; he meets their steady gazes; he looks into their identical eyes; he arranges them, head to foot, upon his knee; he watches as one takes the thumb of the other into its mouth and sucks upon it; he sees that the pair have led a life together that began before anything else. He touches their heads with both of his palms. You, he says, and you.

She walks back, more slowly, the way she came. How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange. It seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She feels exposed, chill, peeled like an onion.

I have a theory,' she says, looking far ahead, at where salt meets sky, 'that marriages end not because of something you did say but because of something you didn't. All you have to do now is work out what it is.

Qu'as-tu vu? lui demande-t-il. - Rien. Ton cÅ"ur. - Ce n'est rien? dit-il, faussement outré. Rien? Comment peux-tu dire une chose pareille?" Elle lui sourit, fait semblant de sourire, mais il lui prend alors la main et la pose sur sa poitrine. "Et ce n'est pas mon cÅ"ur que tu as vu, lui dit-il. Mais le tien.

Later, and for the rest of her life, she will think that if she had left there and then, if she had gathered her bags, her plants, her honey, and taken the path home, if she had heeded her abrupt, nameless unease, she might have changed what happened next. If she had left her swarming bees to their own devices, their own ends, instead of working to coax them back into their hives, she might have headed off what was coming.

Esme is thinking about the hard thing. The difficult one. She does this only rarely. But sometimes she gets the urge and today is one of those days when she seems to see Hugo. In the corner of her eye, a small shape crawling through the shadow in the lee of a door, the space beneath the bed. Or she can hear the pitch of his voice in a chair scraped across the floor. There's no knowing how he might choose to be with her.

Is this what it feels like to die, to sense the nearness of something you can't avoid?

Peter had been feeling lately that perhaps he and Jenny had come to the end of their story

The witching hour," Daniel always called this time of day. He used to go out in it, every evening, and have a last cigarette as he walked the perimeter of the garden. He liked the moment, he said, when it was neither day nor night, but indefinably both.

She sees the girl, Iris, sitting with her legs crossed at the table, and it strikes Esme as odd that she herself had been sitting there too, just a moment ago. She sees the chair that had been hers—that is still hers. It is angled away from the table and there is her plate, with the half-eaten potato. Amazing how easy it is to get up and walk away from a table, from a plate of food, how no one stops you, how it wouldn't occur to anyone here that they could stop you.

Odd that your life can contain such significant trip wires to your future and, even while you wander through them, you have no idea.

the time I spent in hospital is the hinge on which my childhood swung.

Mother and Father had said one night, just before my wedding, that her name would not be mentioned again and that they would thank me if I would act accordingly. And I did, act accordingly, that is, although I thought about her a great deal more than they realised. So I pulled out the letters and—

Had she been too hard on her as a girl? Was that why she'd grown up so fearful, somehow, so reluctant to make her way in the world?

we were both trying to see the people we had been, those ghost selves who no longer existed, those able-bodied bipeds who never thought twice about the miracle of independent movement, who had been swallowed inside the sessile, atrophied beings we now were. I

And she holds the photograph. She holds it in her hands. She looks at it and she knows.

Will you listen to yourself, she said to him, and added, eejit, just loud enough for him to hear. When I looked back at him I saw that he was looking at her, I saw the way it was, that he might dissolve like sugar in water, and when I saw this I—

I am also shouting at the top of my voice. There's something about living in the middle of nowhere that invites this indulgence.

I think about the person I was in my mid 20's. I consider her. I try to recall how it felt to be that age. What were the frameworks of her days? The patterns of her thoughts? I am as far from her now as she was from her childhood. She is the median line between me and my birth.

The world was suddenly still; nothing was being required of me; I could stand in the quiet of my own skin.

I give thanks for the wise qualities of the evergreen trees that have stood by me this day: may you show me how my own heart can be evergreen and growing through winters of doubt and darkness.

I enjoy privacy. I think it's nice to have a little mystery. I think because of technology a lot of the mystery is gone in life, and I'd like to preserve some of that.