People don’t always want to be with people. It gets tiring.
If I was made of cake I’d eat myself before somebody else could.
For some people, she thought, trials were only temporary; they sailed towards happiness through the roughest weather.
It came to Mary now that her mother had been right, after all; Mary had been born for this. In sixteen years she’d shot along the shortest route she could find between life and death, as the crow flew.
… where there’s one there’s ten.’That’s crazy math.
For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.
Scared is what you’re feeling. Brave is what you’re doing.
People move around so much in the world, things get lost.
In the yard of the inn, Daffy Cadwaladyr introduced himself. “Short for Davyd,” he said pleasantly.The Londoner looked as if she’d never heard a sillier name in her life.
And why must it always be presumed that a woman’s views are based on personal considerations?
Men never feel quite the same about a woman’s body once they know it’s done that thing: widened and torn to push out a baby’s head.
Daffy bent down suddenly, and picked a small startled white flower. “Anemone,” he said, handing it over; he made her repeat the word until she had it right. “Find me a silk to match that.
Sometimes words were like glass that broke in her mouth.
The sound of the pages turning was the sound of magic. The dry liquid feel of paper under fingertips was what magic felt like.
Any subject we exclude from fiction will drop from our culture’s memory.
…real loneliness is having no one to miss. Think yourself lucky you’ve known something worth missing.
It was the word ‘late’ that did it. Such a stupid word to use of the dead, implying that they would be with us today if they hadn’t happened to be delayed in traffic somewhere…
And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarified nothing.
In the days when wishing was having, I got what I wished and then I wish I hadn’t.
Goodbye, Room.” I wave up at Skylight. “Say goodbye,” I tell Ma. “Goodbye, Room.”Ma says it but on mute.I look back one more time. It’s like a crater, a hole where something happened. Then we go out the door.
I think she was too tired to play anymore, she was in a hurry to get to Heaven so she didn’t wait, why didn’t she wait for me?
This is a bad story.”“Sorry. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”“No, you should,” I say.“But—”“I don’t want there to be bad stories and me not know them.
Nowadays ‘invisibility’ was supposed to be the big problem, but the way I saw it was, all that mattered was to be visible to yourself.
I may have had moments of regret in my life, but you know, they wouldn’t add up to an hour.
Keep your heart infinitesimally small and sorrow will never spy it, never plunge, never flap away with your heart in her claws.
You know who you belong to, Jack?”“Yeah.”“Yourself.”He’s wrong, actually, I belong to Ma.
That’s what you got for being a servant of no ambition: a shrunken life, hung up like a gibbet as a warning to others.
And tonight Mary could taste bitterness going down like a nut, settling in her stomach. It planted itself, put down roots, and began to grow, nourished on her dark blood.
Is there a word for adults when they aren’t parents?”Steppa laughs. “Folks with other things to do?””Like what things?””Jobs, I guess. Friends. Trips. Hobbies.
I tend to be so lost in the work that I don’t notice the weather. My partner will come home and say, ‘Beautiful day, wasn’t it?’ and I’ll say, ‘Was it?’ as I won’t have noticed the real world at all.