Kim Edwards

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Dinosaurs drank this water, did you know that? Water moves forever in a circle; someday, little ones, your grandchildren may even drink your tears.”

“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]”

“Grief, it seemed, was a physical place.”

“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.”

“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.”

“But she had felt since childhod that her life would n ot be ordinary. A moment would come- she would know it when she saw it- and everything would change.”

“It wasn't right. He knew that, but it was like falling: once you started you couldn't stop until something stopped you.”

“It's funny how things seem different, suddenly.”

“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.”

“In some deep place in her heart, Caroline had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry had once known her as no one else ever could. But it was not true. He had never even glimpsed her.”

“You're right, Norah, anything can happen, anytime. But what goes wrong isn't 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.”

“She saw herself moving through another life, an exotic, difficult, satisfying life.”

“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.”

“Anything can happen. But what goes wrong isn’t 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.”

“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.”

“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 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]”

“Around me the beautiful windows, connecting me to other lives and other times, to things done and also deliberately left undone, stood dark. Rose, I was sure, had acted out of love, yet for Iris her mother's absence had remained an unresolved sadness at the center of her life. I thought of what Rose had written about anger, about its power to corrupt, to make a space for evil. Maybe she was right. Maybe evil, that old-fashioned word, could be called other things, disharmony or dysfunction. Maybe Rose was right and evil wasn't attached top an individual as much as if was a force in the world, a seeing force, one that worked like a self-replicating virus, seeking to entangle, to ensnare, to undo beauty. [p.353]”

“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]”

“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]”

“... the Iroquois take dreams very seriously. They see them as the secret wishes of the soul--the heart's desire, so to speak. Not all dreams, maybe, but the important ones. [p.254]”

“Some dreams matter, illuminate a crucial choice or reveal some intuition that's trying to push its way to the surface. Other, though, are detritus, the residue of the day reassembling itself in some disjointed and chaotic way ... Frantic dreams, they left me tired, and I woke grouchy to another rainy day, the sky so densely gray and the rain so thick that I couldn't that I couldn't see the opposite shore [p, 166]”

“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].”

“For this is what I have learned, in my short life: do not act out of anger. Act from love or not at all. I have seen it, how anger makes a space for what I must call evil.”

“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]”

“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]”

“I've been accused of trying too hard to rescue people”

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

“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.”

“What would happen, they conjectured, if they simply went on assuming their children would do everything. Perhaps not quickly. Perhaps not by the book. But what if they simply erased those growth and development charts, with their precise, constricting points and curves? What if they kept their expectations but erased the time line? What harm could it do? Why not try?”

“Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.”

“All day she had been dreaming of the comet, its wild and fiery beauty, what it might mean, how her life might change.”

“You can't stop time. You can't capture light. You can only turn your face up and let it rain down.”

“No one could suspect the intricate mysteries of her heart.”

“It's good to be in love.”

“He could hardly imagine anymore what his life would be without the weight of his hidden knowledge. He'd come to think of it as a kind of penance. It was self-destructive, he could see that, but that was the way things were. People smoked, they jumped out of airplanes, they drank too much and got into their cars and drove without seat belts.”

“The thing is, I used to like that: feeling special because I knew something no one else did. 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?”

“She imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasn't like that. The love was within her all the time, and its only renewal came from giving it away.”

“After all these years, I feel so free. Who knows where I might fly?”

“He'd kept this silence because his own secrets were darker, more hidden, and because he believed that his secrets had created hers.”

“Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.”

“You hold me at arm's length.”

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

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

“Away from the bright motion of the party, she carried her sadness like a dark stone clenched in her palm.”

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

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