Karen Swan > Quotes

“Weren't your friends the family you got to choose?”
― Karen Swan, Christmas at Tiffany's

“It was dusk and the light had an ultra-violet quality to it, a final burst of pigmentation as night and day rushed at each other in a clash of colour prisms before darkness finnaly, inevitably won out.”
― Karen Swan, Christmas in the Snow

“Friendships come down to chemistry, not orders.”
― Karen Swan, Players

“When life gives you something, you have to take it. Because there will be other days when it takes away. You have to recognize the opportunities to be happy and take them, even if on paper it doesn’t make sense.”
― Karen Swan, The Christmas Postcards

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him’ G. K. Chesterton”
― Karen Swan, The Spanish Promise

“Life is so much simpler when people just talk honestly.”
― Karen Swan, Players

“I know, now, that when life gives me something, I have to take it. Because there will be other days when it takes away. I have to recognize the opportunities to be happy and take them, even if on paper it doesn’t make sense.”
― Karen Swan, The Christmas Postcards

“How many times had she crept into them as a little girl, playing hide and seek with Mhairi and Flora and their many brothers? Why couldn't one of those boys have grown into a man who made the very edges of her world flutter and fray? Why had God sent a man she could never have, to own her heart?”
― Karen Swan, The Last Summer

“She felt caught in a permanent state of suspension, as if waiting for life to . . . get bigger, or grow brighter, or speed up somehow.”
― Karen Swan, The Christmas Postcards

“They could never connect, only their punches landed.”
― Karen Swan, All I Want for Christmas

“They glided down the magnificent staircase, the builders' cacophony increasingly audible as they descended, while the open windows at each level brought in raucous shouts from the square, too. Rabble on one side, rubble on the other”
― Karen Swan, The Rome Affair

“We’ve all become so censorious”
― Karen Swan, Midnight in the Snow

“Cesca sat on the small square at the top of her steps, legs outstretched and the last of the wine in her hand as she caught the final rays from the fast-melting sun, which was oozing from the sky”
― Karen Swan, The Rome Affair

“And you? Where did you grow up?’ he asked as he began to grind the beans with the pestle. ‘Oh, a place called Dorset, in the south of England,’ Bo said, watching, fascinated. She’d never had her coffee ground for her by hand before. ‘Nowhere as exciting as this.’ ‘I know Dorset.’ She looked up in surprise. ‘You do?’ ‘I once had an English girlfriend from there. Sherborne.’ ‘That’s not far from where I grew up,’ she said excitedly. ‘Do you know Wimborne?’ He stilled, seeming to think for a moment. ‘I think we went there once. A horse race.’ ‘Yes, at Badbury Rings. A point-to-point, we call it. We always used to go to that.’ She sighed happily at the memories as they rose, unbidden by this unexpected turn in the conversation. ‘Do you know I’ve been all over the world and never once met anyone who knew my home town?”
― Karen Swan, The Christmas Lights

“why does hating you feel better than loving her ever did?’ She swallowed”
― Karen Swan, Midnight in the Snow

“They always said theirs was a pop-up friendship, like one of those camping tents you could pack in a bag and throw open wherever you stopped.”
― Karen Swan, The Rome Affair

“Roosevelt said –“We consider too much the good luck of the early bird”
― Karen Swan, Midnight in the Snow

“Winning is fifty per cent preparation”
― Karen Swan, Midnight in the Snow

“You need to know that your worst moment can turn out to be your best. In every life, there is a defining moment of surrender where you must make the choice to let destiny happen. You have to give yourself up to what must be.”
― Karen Swan

“Home is wherever you are, it may not be exciting or glamorous, but this (indicating the vast view) is the biggest life.”
― Karen Swan, The Christmas Lights

“An ending doesn’t have to be happy for a new beginning to spring up; it will follow anyway”
― Karen Swan, Midnight in the Snow

“You're so long," he grinned, picking up one of her arms and waggling it playfully, as though she was Mr Tickle”
― Karen Swan, The Rome Affair

“We just understood each other. We didn't need a bank of memories and shared experiences to know exactly who the other one was; you don't often get that with people in this life.”
― Karen Swan, The Rome Affair

“I had to sink or swim. So I swam, and became an icon in the process. And that’s pissed them off no end, ever since.”
― Karen Swan, Players

“Be water. Be shapeless. Be formless. Put water in the bottle and it becomes the bottle. Put it in a teapot and it becomes the teapot. Water can flow”
― Karen Swan, Midnight in the Snow

“She knew better than anyone that sometimes it was silence that was the lie. That sometimes it was silence that could kill.”
― Karen Swan, The Rome Affair

“forcing her mind away from the past, even though the shadows slunk over her at every turn.”
― Karen Swan, The Last Summer

“Anger makes people weak because then they lose control,”
― Karen Swan, Midnight in the Snow

“Escaping, traveling...it was all one and the same to her, somehow, this freedom always came at a cost; she had to loose someone close first, someone vital.”
― Karen Swan, The Christmas Lights

“She turned to face him as, suddenly, he was there - as though he always should have been, as though he always was going to be - standing just a metre from her, his eyes burning”
― Karen Swan, The Rome Affair