Ellen Cooney > Quotes

“She was healthy & thriving, like a weed: a weed with no interest in trying to become, say, a proper flower.”
― Ellen Cooney, A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies

“In stacks of the library where I wandered, where almost no one went, where everything was old and a little beat-up, a ray of sunlight came in, filled with swirling bits of dust, when nothing else was moving, and I saw it wasn’t dust but particles of the spirits of those books, free and out playing around, like no one was watching. Moments. They were moments. They belonged to the other thing and they could never be broken, as you can break a clock, but not time.”
― Ellen Cooney, One Night Two Souls Went Walking

“People are so sad,” she said.
“People are so hurt,” she said.
“So please let us not be empty like empty barrels,” she said.
All along, the ceiling light kept doing its thing. And together with Professor Pearls, we answered her, as if this had been planned, “Amen.”
― Ellen Cooney, One Night Two Souls Went Walking

“She didn’t want the woman to open her eyes and her ears to the new stillness.”
― Ellen Cooney, One Night Two Souls Went Walking

“Breakfast delivered on a tray every morning is joy, and so is a meal at noon if she doesn't go out. To dine every evening in an alcove of the inn set aside specially for the Morleys is a fore-taste of heaven. The alcove is large enough to entertain guests; they have use of a secluded parlor as well. Lydia could serve on committees, receive callers, go shopping, order a carriage whenever she felt like it, visit her children's houses and spoil her grandchildren without having them all congregate at the house and make chaos.”
― Ellen Cooney, Thanksgiving

“Silently, his tears were streaming down his face like water from a faucet that could not be turned all the way off.”
― Ellen Cooney, One Night Two Souls Went Walking

“I’d been watching his face in the moment he heard me saying the words, “I can go anywhere.” He had never wanted me to be someone who goes anywhere. That was exactly what his face was saying to me.”
― Ellen Cooney, One Night Two Souls Went Walking

“I never used to believe in having an ‘afterlife’ until I got a cat and I realized you can’t say the word ‘tomorrow’ to an animal and expect them to know what you mean. Putting two and two together, I was less depressed about having a tomorrow after the end of my life on Earth, which has not been all that great.”
― Ellen Cooney, One Night Two Souls Went Walking

“At his funeral, a supervisor of his home told me he’d made a request of his housemates. Whenever they looked up at a plane, would they remember him? And instead of saying the dumb thing people say when someone dies, about wishing their soul would rest in peace, he wanted everyone to think of him and say, like a solemn prayer, “May his soul have kick-ass adventures, flying and flying and flying.”
― Ellen Cooney, One Night Two Souls Went Walking

“it her fault that the graveyard has the best dirt? She loves her plants! Just”
― Ellen Cooney, Thanksgiving

“I looked at the pink fragility of the old woman’s mouth, toothless like a bird’s. I remembered reading somewhere that birds became birds only when their ancestors stopped having teeth. It was the lightness of their mouths that let them be airborne. It wasn’t just about growing wings.”
― Ellen Cooney, One Night Two Souls Went Walking

“He’s gone to light,” I was told.”
― Ellen Cooney, One Night Two Souls Went Walking

“Sometimes when dogs greeted a returning soldier, they'd go over the edge. They would have to take a few moments to run crazily in circles around the human, or around a room or a yard. I'd have to take a break from watching, so my brain had a chance to absorb what I was seeing: that there is such a thing as joy being bigger than the container that holds it.”
― Ellen Cooney, The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances

“Loneliness. There is no worse loneliness than the loneliness of a dog who never was anything but lonely, because the loneliness is normal, like a heartbeat. Do you think it’s easy to go to the place inside a dog where the loneliness is, when you can’t even do it with yourself?”
― Ellen Cooney, The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances: A Novel

“then the bottom fell out of everything that used to have a bottom, and now she's expected to kill her own plants. At”
― Ellen Cooney, Thanksgiving