I love you. And if I have to let you go to make you happy, I’ll do it.
Isabelle had always simply reacted in her life. Someone left her behind; she followed. Someone told her she couldn’t do something; she did it. Every barrier she turned into a gate.
She ought to have recognized love’s scarcity early on. If success were gold, lying in rivers, love was a diamond, buried hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the earth and unrecognizable in its natural form.
You couldn’t control the direction of your family any more than you could stop the continental shelf from breaking apart. All you could do was hold on for the ride.
The truth was that her photographs were an extension of who she was, what she thought, how she felt. It took perfect concentration to capture the exquisite pain of personal tragedy on film. You had to be there one hundred percent, in the moment – but it had to be their moment.
My skin has the crinkled appearance of wax paper that someone has tried to flatten and reuse. My eyes fail me often – in the darkness, when headlights flash, when rain falls. It is unnerving, this new unreliability in my vision. Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present.
We’ll be friends through jobs and kids and marriages.
When you get older, you’ll understand. There’s a certain comfort in the familiar.
They were so... larger than life, these Yanks, with their ready smiles and booming voices. And their gratitude... She’d lost track of the times an American had hugged her so tightly she’d come off her feet.
Your’re successful beyond your wildest dreams and it still isn’t enough?
It was otherworldly somehow, magical in its vast expanse, an incomparable landscape of soaring glacier-filled white mountains that ran the length of the horizon, knife-tip points pressed high into a cloudless cornflower-blue sky.
For most of her life she’d been able to box up bad memories or disappointments and store them deep in the back of her mind, in a place so dark they couldn’t be seen.
She tucked her chin, squared her shoulders, and set a new goal for herself.
She is angry. And angry people make mistakes in war and die.
If I’m finally taking a trip into the unknown; there ought to be photographs to document this momentous event.
She’s sick and she’s been treated badly, but she can’t be gone. She had the heart of a lion.
You’re stronger than you think you are. You can get through this, whatever happens, you can get through it. Just don’t forget... the rain. It’s an angel’s tears. And every glass you’ve ever seen is half full. Don’t let yourself forget that. I know what it does to a person... forgetting that hope is out there.
Does one follow a leader blindly?
Her beauty had always made it easy for her to break rules without reprisal.
It’s funny how things slip away, pieces of us, even.