Kim Edwards Father Quotations

This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.

She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.

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

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

It's funny how things seem different, suddenly.

Grief, it seemed, was a physical place.

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

His love for her was so deeply woven with resentment that he could not untangle the two.

Lately, the world felt fragile, like a blown egg, as if it might shatter beneath a careless touch.

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.

Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.

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.

No one could suspect the intricate mysteries of her heart.

There was something not quite right about her eagerness, an eerie kind of voyeurism in her need for bad news.

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?

A moment might be a thousand different things.

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

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

A fear Paul had transformed all these years, like a gifted alchemist, into anger and rebellion.

He fished in his pocket for his keys and instead pulled out the last geode, gray and smooth, earth-shaped. He held it, warming in his palm, thinking of all mysteries the world contained: layers of stone, concealed beneath the flesh of earth and grass; these dull rocks, with their glimmering hidden hearts.

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.

So something had begun, and now she could not stop it. Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement. She could leave this place today. She could start a new life somewhere else.

Either things grow and change or they die.

Norah looked at her son’s tiny face, surprised, as always, by his name. he had not grown into it yet, he still wore it like a wrist band, something that might easily slip off and disappear. She had read about people – where? she could not remember this either – who refused to name their children for several weeks, feeling them to be not yet of the earth, suspended still between two worlds.

Her voice, high and clear, moved through the leaves, through the sunlight. It splashed onto the gravel, the grass. He imagined the notes falling into the air like stones into water, rippling the invisible surface of the world. Waves of sound, waves of light: his father had tried to pin everything down, but the world was fluid and could not be contained.

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

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.

It seemed there was no end at all to the lies a person could tell, once she got started.

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.

He had handed his daughter to Caroline Gill and that act had led him here, years later, to this girl in motion of her own, this girl who had decided yes, a brief moment of release in the back of a car, in the room of a silent house, this girl who had stood up later, adjusting her clothes, with now knowledge of how that moment was already shaping her life.

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.

Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement.

He carried Paul inside and up the stairs. He gave him a drink of water and the orange chewable aspirin he like and sat with him on the bed, holding his hand...This was what he yearned to capture on film: these rare moments where the world seemed unified, coherent, everything contained in a single fleeting image. A spareness that held beauty and hope and motion - a kind of silvery poetry, just as the body was poetry in blood and flesh and bone.

You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy.

He had never even glimpsed her.