Sweety > Sweety's Quotes

“Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“The palest ink will endure beyond the memories of man”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?”
― Twan Eng Tan, The Garden of Evening Mists

“It begins to rain softly, raising goose-pimples on the pond’s skin.”
― Twan Eng Tan, The Garden of Evening Mists

“A garden is composed of a variety of clocks, Aritomo had once told me. Some of them run faster than the others, and some of them move slower than wee can ever perceive. I only understood this fully long after I had been his apprentice.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Before me lies a voyage of a million miles, and my memory is the moonlight I will borrow to illuminate my way.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“It was odd how Aritomo's life seemed to glance off mine; we were like two leaves falling from a tree, touching each other now and again as they spiraled to the forest floor.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Sometimes I ask myself if there’s any limit to the harm people can do to each other.” “No,”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“Rachel had been worried she couldn't remember what Sam looked like; now she worried he wouldn't recognize her.”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“So, he explained, yellow was love, green was a peaceful, calm feeling, and brown was sad, like when his little dog died. He said gray was anxious, so before an exam at school everything seemed blanketed in a dreary fog. Black and white meant nothing special to him, but blue—he said blue was full of hope,”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“Neither had to say that any child would choose a family of their own, no matter how shattered, over the rigors and routines of the Home.”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“Who am I to judge, as long as you’re happy.”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan #8

“You’re only ever as happy as your least happy child?’ ”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“You know how you just have to touch your child, sometimes? How you drink him in with your eyes and you could stare at him for hours and you marvel at how dear and impossibly perfect he is?”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“The thing about caller ID is,” Red said, more or less to himself, “it seems a little like cheating. A person should be willing to take his chances, answering the phone.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“Houses need humans,” Red said. “You all should know that. Oh, sure, humans cause wear and tear—scuffed floors and stopped-up toilets and such—but that’s nothing compared to what happens when a house is left on its own. It’s like the heart goes out of it. It sags, it slumps, it starts to lean toward the ground.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“Abby had a little trick that she used any time Red acted like a cranky old codger. She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“For years, she had been in mourning for the way she had let her life slip through her fingers. Given another chance, she’d told herself, she would take more care to experience it. But lately, she was finding that she had experienced it after all and just forgotten, and now it was returning to her.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“You wake in the morning, you’re feeling fine, but all at once you think, “Something’s not right. Something’s off somewhere; what is it?” And then you remember that it’s your child—whichever one is unhappy.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“But still, you know how it is when you’re missing a loved one. You try to turn every stranger into the person you were hoping for. You hear a certain piece of music and right away you tell yourself that he could have changed his clothing style, could have gained a ton of weight, could have acquired a car and then parked that car in front of another family’s house. “It’s him!” you say. “He came! We knew he would; we always …” But then you hear how pathetic you sound, and your words trail off into silence, and your heart breaks.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“I really believe that most people who seem scary are just sad.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“She loved them so much that she felt a kind of hollowness on the inner surface of her arms whenever she looked at them-an ache of longing to pull them close and hold them tight against her.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“This was an attractive room, spacious and well designed, but it had the comfortably shabby air of a place whose inhabitants had long ago stopped seeing it.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“In my opinion,” Red said, “going to Florida for the winter is kind of like … not paying your dues. Not standing fast for the hard part.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“Oh, the terrible, crushing, breath-stealing burden of people who think they own you!”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they’d felt all those years? Although Denny might not be okay, even now. Abby”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“You’ve forgiven the British?” He subsided into his seat. For a while he was silent, his gaze turned inward. “They couldn’t kill me when we were at war. And they couldn’t kill me when I was in the camp,” he said finally, his voice subdued. “But holding on to my hatred for forty-six years . . . that would have killed me.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“When the First Man and First Woman were banished from their home, Time was also set loose upon the world.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“The noise of insects sizzled in the air, like fat in a smoking wok.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Your family is real, but mine isn't? Real people with real feelings, but my family isn't real to you. You think. I'm a character. A story. Those women you talk about. Not real people to you. Stupid women. I'm real. I'm as real as you are. My family is real like your family.”
― Bryn Greenwood, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things