Anne Youngson > Quotes

“I understand now that loneliness is worse if there are people about than if there are not.”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“But I do not mind. I am like a man standing on a shore watching people he loves rowing a boat. As long as they are safe in the boat, nothing else is so important.”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“You have a gift for finding joy in small moments, which is a thing I used to have, but have lost,”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“We should look inside ourselves for fulfillment. It is not fair to burden children or grandchildren with the obligation to make us whole. Our obligation to them is to make them safe and provide them with an education. Karin can do that alone, if she chooses. She owes no one anything else. She owes it to herself to do what is best for her. When I had said this, Mary kissed me. I can’t remember the last time she did that. Or the last time I enjoyed a conversation more.”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“I was irritated by the simplicity of my mother’s view of the world when I was younger, but now that I know how hard it is to keep upright, cheerful, balanced, and in control, which is expected of us as adults, I can appreciate the mechanisms she used to achieve this.”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“Our letters have meant so much to us because we have both arrived at the same point in our lives. More behind us than ahead of us. Paths chosen that define us. Enough time left to change”
― Anne Youngson

“When I look at Karin now, I wonder if I am suffering from post-traumatic joy.”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“We may want to be other than we are, but we do not want to unsettle the opinion people have already formed; maybe to replace it with a lesser opinion.”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“The sky was magnificent. I have always loved the sky and I do not take notice of it often enough.”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“I can see that living alone, as you do, leaves empty space around you, and that can feel lonely. Living together with other people, as I do, can feel lonely, too.”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“Does being grown up mean we are all doomed to be ordinary?” “No,” said Anastasia. “It means accepting we are all extraordinary in ordinary ways.” Then”
― Anne Youngson, The Narrowboat Summer

“Instead, I had to compose a letter. I could picture you reading the letter and I imagined you would do this slowly and carefully, so I felt I needed to write my letter to you slowly and carefully. I had to be sure I had read yours to Professor Glob slowly and carefully so that I could be sure to address the points you made. So we have gone on. We have written at length and thoughtfully, and to do this, we have both had to read the letters we received in a thoughtful way.”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“Our letters have meant so much to us because we have both arrived at the same point in our lives. More behind us than ahead of us. Paths chosen that define us. Enough time left to change.”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“After the ceremony we went to a hotel, and there was food (which I did not cook and therefore enjoyed)”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“I only enjoy talking when I have a topic I want to talk about to someone whose reaction I am interested in.”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“I thought how private we have all become. How self-sufficient. Of course, we are all members of whatever society we live in, but not in the way the Tollund Man’s contemporaries would have been members of the community they lived in. They would have been cogs, wheels, brackets, levers, pulleys, each making their society work according to their skills and position. Now we are like ball bearings, complete in ourselves and joining other ball bearings only to form shapes that suit our purpose.”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“The preservation of an object of beauty carries meaning, I think, beyond the physical appearance, to those who look at it and handle it after those who first made it and owned it are gone.”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“At the time, I was enjoying watching her doing the preparation and the cooking and the sort of conversation you have when one of you is occupied and the other is idle.”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“You are the person you’ve always been, but that person is only now rising to the surface.”
― Anne Youngson, The Narrowboat Summer

“my lifetime are completely lost. The expression”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“When I wake in the night and wonder if, after all, I have wasted my chances and should have done something different with the time and the talents I have been given, I am often terrified by how small are the things I study and how big and beyond understanding is everything they represent.”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“I’m not sure I want to have what I don’t have as much as I want to keep what I do have.”
― Anne Youngson, The Narrowboat Summer

“Sally sa: "Jag har inte varit tvungen att gå på så många möten, men när jag har gjort det har jag alltid väntat på att dom ska ta slut så att jag kan gå iväg och ta itu med nåt annat. Även om det inte har funnits särskilt mycket annat jag behövt ta itu med."
"Vad tänker du på när du väntar på att en sluss ska tömmas?" frågade Eve.
"Åh, frid."
"Jag också."
[..] Efter en stund sa Eve: "Så vad väntar du på nu? På att resan ska ta slut?"
"Nej, jag befinner mig i ett svävande tillstånd. Du har ingen aning om hur vilsamt det är.”
― Anne Youngson, The Narrowboat Summer

“When I wake in the night and wonder if, after all, I have waste my chances and should have done something different with the time and the talents I have been given, I am often terrified by how small are the things I study and how big and beyond understanding is everything they represent.”
― Anne Youngson

“Although I spend so much of my time in the kitchen, putting food on the table, providing food is not part of the story I tell myself of my life.”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“It is so long since the sacrifice was made, I was so young at the time, it took so many years for me to realize I had made it, that I can no longer say what, exactly, it was that I sacrificed; what it was that would have given me the satisfaction Edward feels every day. Perhaps it was the trip to Denmark—that could have been enough. But the blank space in my life feels too great to be overwritten by so slight an act.”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“She was crying for herself, not for Esme, and she was crying because she had suddenly realized, after all these years of skipping through life pleasing herself and being pleased with herself for having so arranged it, that she mattered to no one. She was crying, for fuck’s sake, at the idea that there would be no one crying at her funeral.”
― Anne Youngson, The Narrowboat Summer

“Superstition is such a scornful word, applied by rational people to anything that appears not to be rational belief, not seeing there is beauty and meaning and purpose in putting aside everything that can be explained and imagining something quite miraculous...”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum

“Whenever I pick raspberries, I go as carefully as possible down the row, looking for every ripe fruit. But however careful I am, when I turn round to go back the other way, I find fruit I had not seen approaching from the opposite direction. Another life, I thought, might be like a second pass down the row of raspberry canes; there would be good things I had not come across in my first life, but I suspect I would find much of the fruit was already in my basket.”
― Anne Youngson

“Your loss was so much greater than any I have experienced, so abrupt and yet foreshadowed. As if Birgitt had been dying for years but it was never possible to admit she was, and there was never a moment when it became inevitable that she would.”
― Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum