Day after day in the season of disaster, it can be hard to recognize a chance in fortune when it comes.
The story is told in so many ways, depending on who is doing the telling, and what needs to be heard at the time.
Oh, the accident necessary to fiction!
You lost your copper as well as your faith in wishes, and prayers.
Only, sometimes, in the text of a book here and there, we tap the page with a finger and say, “This is what my lost days were like. Something like this.
There was no apology for the way the world worked. Only accommodation to it, while at the same time committing – somehow – not to give up.
Her voice is hoarse. She’s caught a catarrh from that dreadful draft.
Being vulnerable to desolation also arises from being unable to picture a set of choices with which to change your lot in life.
Stinging words! You re critical of everyone,” observes Iris. “Oh, not everyone,” says Clara in an offhand manner. “Only everybody who’s alive as well as most people who are dead. I feel quite neutral about anybody not yet born.
History is a long time in the making.
It’s more convenient to have a hero waiting in the wings than to endure a blowhard standing in the spotlight.
You charming idiot.
Her head had turned away quickly as she stepped down, not to hide her tears but to soften the fact of their absence.
Behind every aspect of the world is another aspect of the world.
You leave home, I have learned, counting the trip day by day. If you ever get to return, you count the trip miracle by miracle.
A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un.
Lost is not an address, it’s not permission to fail, it’s not an excuse.
Those who are roped into bed at night often fall into delusions of flight.
The family was still hard-pressed for money, and dreamed of savory treats to eat, but they had the warmth of one another, and enough on which to live, and in most parts of the world that is called plenty.
Light will blind us in time, but what we learn in the dark can see us through. To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.