Nora Carroll > Quotes

“There must be a precise moment when wet cement turns dry, when it no longer accepts footprints or scratched-in declarations of love; an ordinary moment, unnoticed, just like any. But in that moment, the facts of a life can change.”
― Nora Carroll, The Color of Water in July

“Figure out what matters, then hold on to it. That’s how you keep things together. By not letting go.”
― Nora Carroll, The Color of Water in July

“Great literature speaks the truth,” she said. “You will recognize it because it is impossible not to recognize it. It sings its own song—it hums with the power of righteousness . . .”
― Nora Carroll, Academy Girls

“only failures get married, and”
― Nora Carroll, Academy Girls

“that this was a face that she knew, in some deep way, some way that predated her own self, like she had known him before she had ever seen him, that she knew him as she knew her own self. What”
― Nora Carroll, The Color of Water in July

“What if you kept coming back to the same place, as your mother did and her mother before her? What if four generations of women kept coming back and living their lives and depositing their stuff: old letters, telegraph receipts, photos, or dramatic stories of loving and drowning that got told and told again. Then, couldn’t it be that the house itself became the family story? Narratives bending, circling, and turning around the same set of rooms. She envisioned the rooms of Journey’s End as they encircled the central living room, layers of a family, intertwining and overlapping over time. Maybe, she thought, she was sunk in a lot deeper than she’d realized.”
― Nora Carroll, The Color of Water in July

“There was a name for what I was doing here. It was called a last chance.”
― Nora Carroll, Academy Girls

“tried”
― Nora Carroll, The Color of Water in July

“To teach in a school where you once were a girl is to come up abruptly and often against reminders of your own mortality. Within each reflection lurks the girl you once were, clouded, marred even, by the woman you have become. I wondered if Miss Pymstead had ever been disappointed. If the look in her eyes that we”
― Nora Carroll, Academy Girls

“Just stand still and let the rain pour down on you now.”
― Nora Carroll, The Color Of Water In July

“The story starts in summer, of course. When else would a Michigan story start?”
― Nora Carroll, The Color of Water in July

“sunny summer day. That’s why everyone wanted to be near her—because they hoped that some of that quality would rub off on them. But that Lila, the one I saw, the one everyone else thought they saw, was flimsy, and inflammable. Light a match to her, and she just flashed up into smoke and was”
― Nora Carroll, The Color of Water in July

“head. “I can wait for birds to alight in trees and for a cloud to pass behind that tree when the sun is at a certain spot. I can wait until the sky is a certain color and the wing is at a certain angle and the light is coming from a particular direction. I’m a guy who knows how to wait, Jess. Maybe you think I can’t, or I won’t, but I intend to. And I know that I can.” Daniel was looking”
― Nora Carroll, The Color of Water in July

“She had that quality, selective blindness, when she just didn’t look straight at things she didn’t want to see.”
― Nora Carroll, The Color Of Water In July

“our”
― Nora Carroll, The Color of Water in July

“Before I slipped Lissa’s take-home exam out”
― Nora Carroll, Academy Girls

“Words once memorized came back to me: the more things stay the same, the more they change. A line among many lines I was led to believe would be worthwhile to remember. But that was a long time ago, when I was a girl in a circle of girls. When all of us believed that words mattered as much as money, flesh, and blood.”
― Nora Carroll, Academy Girls