Julier > Julier's Quotes

“There are still more days to travel in this life. And he knows that the man who makes the journey has been shaped by every day and every person along the way. Scars are just another kind of memory....Soon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone.”
― M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“Later still, the war memorials would sprout from the earth, dwelling not on the loss, but on what the loss had won, and what a fine thing it was to be victorious. “Victorious and dead,” some muttered, “is a poor sort of victory.”
― M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“Izz, I've learned the hard way that to have any kind of a future you've got to give up hope of ever changing your past.”
― M. L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“But how? How can you just get over these things, darling?...You've had so much strife but you're always happy. How do you do it?'
'I choose to...I can leave myself to rot in the past, spend my time hating people for what happened, like my father did, or I can forgive and forget.'
'But it's not that easy.'
He smiled that Frank smile. 'Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things...I would have to make a list, a very, very long list and make sure I hated the people on it the right amount. That I did a proper job of hating, too: very Teutonic! No' - his voice became sober- 'we always have a choice. All of us.”
― M. L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent.”
― ML Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“Perhaps when it comes to it, no one is just the worst thing they ever did.”
― M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“Then he remembered Ralph's words--"no point in fighting your war over and over until you get it right.”
― M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“Being over there changes a man. Right and wrong don't look so different anymore to some.”
― M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“It astounds him that the tiny life of the girl means more to him than all the millennia before it. He struggles to make sense of his emotions – how he can feel both tenderness and unease when she kisses him goodnight, or presents a grazed knee for him to kiss better with the magic power that only a parent has.For Isabel, too, he is torn between the desire he feels for her, the love, and the sense that he cannot breathe. The two sensations grate at one another, unresolved.”
― M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“That was the only thing that had got him through the four years of blood and madness: Know exactly where your gun is when you doze for ten minutes in your dugout; always check your gas mask; see that your men have understood their orders to the letter. You don't think ahead in years or months: you think about this hour and maybe the next. Anything else is speculation" p. 33”
― M. L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers' deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother's life like a stain. As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent loss a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or daughter. That seemed odd. As to her own status, she wondered whether she was still technically a sister, now that her adored brothers had died.”
― M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line.... People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It's a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

“At some point in the evening Dellarobia had stopped being amazed that Ovid had turned into someone new, and understood he had become himself, in the presence of his wife. With the sense of a great weight settling, she recognized marriage. Not the precarious risk she's balanced for years against forbidden fruits, something easily lost in a brittle moment by flying away or jumping a train to ride off on someone else's steam. She was not about to lose it. She'd never had it.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

“They couldn't close out the whole world, maybe, but they could sure find something on their TV or radio to put scientists or foreigners or whatever they thought he was in a bad light. Truly, they were no better than the city people always looking down on southerners ... If people played their channels right, they could be spared from disagreement for the length of their natural lives. Finally she got it. The need for so many channels.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

“A journalist's job is to collect information," Ovid said to Pete.
"Nope," Pete said. "That's what we do. It's not what they do."
Dellarobia was unready to be pushed out of the conversation just like that. "Then what do you think the news people drive their Jeeps all the way out here for?"
"To shore up the prevailing view of their audience and sponsors."
"Pete takes a dim view of his fellow humans," Ovid said. "He prefers insects.
Dellarobia turned her chair halfway around to face Pete, scraping noisily against the cement floor. "You're saying people only tune in to news they know they're going to agree with?"
"Bingo," said Pete.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

“I had always thought of the sea as a boundary keeping me in my place on land. Now, though, it became an opening.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“That’s how fossil hunting is: It takes over, like a hunger, and nothing else matters but what you find. And even when you find it, you still start looking again the next minute, because there might be something even better waiting.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“he was a collector rather than a hunter, buying his knowledge rather than seeking it with his own eyes and hands. I”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“A writer needs four things to achieve greatness, Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.”
“That’s only three.”
Alvis finished his wine. “You have to do disappointment twice.”
― Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins

“Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author's painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it”
― Susan Hill, Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home

“In Britain, the happy are few and suspect….For the British, happiness is a transatlantic import. And by “transatlantic” they mean American. ....For the English, life is about not happiness but muddling through, getting by.”
― Eric Weiner

“She told him television was a bad influence. Probably she was right. Like those white birds he's been seeing outside the window, it flashes its wings and promises whatever you want, even before you knew you wanted it.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Pigs in Heaven

“Cash misses his wife with a blank pain in his chest, and he misses his sisters and cousins, who have known him since he was a strong, good-looking boy. Everyone back there remembers, or if they are too young, they've been told. The old ones get to hang on the sweet, perfect past. Cash was the best at climbing trees; his sister Letty won the story bees. The woman who married Letty's husband's brother, a beauty named Sugar, was spotted one time drinking a root beer and had her picture in LIFE magazine. They all know. Now she has thin hair and a humped back but she's still Sugar, she gets to walk around Heaven, Oklahoma, with everybody thinking she's pretty and special. which she is. That's the trouble with moving away from family, he realizes. You lose your youth entirely, you have only the small tired baggage that is carried within the body.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Pigs in Heaven

“This is the Hong Kong curse that expat housewives talk about in hushed voices: the man who takes to Hong Kong the wrong way. He moves from an egalitarian American society, where he’s supposed to take out the trash every day and help with the dinner dishes, to a place where women cater to his every desire—a secretary who anticipates his needs before he does, a servant in the house who brings him his espresso just the way he likes it and irons his boxers and his socks—and the local population is not as sassy with the comebacks as where he came from, so, of course, he then looks for that in every corner of his life.”
― Janice Y.K. Lee, The Expatriates

“[Margaret] went to a talk on parenting at the end of the school year where the speaker had said that doing good things, charitable things, was actually a selfish act, because it made you feel good. She has been mulling that ever since. Should she do something selfless, something good? Should she reach out to someone who really needs her forgiveness? Would this make her feel better?”
― Janice Y.K. Lee, The Expatriates

“It was a vow we made those long years ago. Neither of us spoke of it afterwards, but it hung between us like a spider web, fragile and easy to break, but danged hard to get shed of once the threads took hold.”
― Cassie Dandridge Selleck, The Pecan Man

“[Hilary] ...after you left, I didn't understand what had happened. David, I don't hate you and I don't blame you. I don't think you were happy, and I wasn't that happy either. We were just coasting, seeing what would happen, and then you pulled the plug. Right?”
― Janice Y.K. Lee, The Expatriates

“I [Music] was born in the open air, in the breaks of waves and the whistling of sandstorms, the hoots of owls and the cackles of tui birds. I travel in echoes. I ride the breeze. I was forged in nature, rugged and raw. Only man shapes my edges to make me beautiful. [Chapter 2]”
― Mitch Albom, The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto

“Everyone joins a band in this life. And what you play always affects someone. Sometimes, it affects the world.”
― Mitch Albom, The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto

“The secret is not to make your music louder, but to make the world quieter.”
― Mitch Albom, The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto