chlo ☾’s Reviews > The Nightingale > Status Update

“Still. I am here, on a plane heading home, and I have an opportunity to make a different choice than the one I made when my pain was fresh and a future predicated on the past seemed impossible.”

“He’s such an American, this son of mine. He thinks one’s life can be distilled to a narrative that has a beginning and an end. He knows nothing about the kind of sacrifice that, once made, can never be either fully forgotten or fully borne.“

“In his face, I see the whole of my life. I see a baby who came to me long after I’d given up… and a hint of the beauty I once had. I see… my life in his eyes.”

“She wanted to remember him for as long as forever was.”

“Sometime—she didn’t know when—she closed her eyes and reached out, placing a hand in the hollow of his stomach, feeling it rise and fall with his breathing. It was like resting her hand on the ocean in summer, when the tide was coming in. Touching him, she fell asleep.”

“Maybe she would love him for only this day, or maybe for only the next week, or maybe until she was an old, old woman. Maybe he would be the love of her life… or her love for the duration of this war… or maybe he would only be her first love. All she really knew was that in this terrible, frightening world, she had stumbled into something unexpected. And she would not let it go again.”

“I did say I love you, which must have sounded insane… but it’s not insane now… maybe it’s the only sane thing in all of this. Love, I mean.”

“‘It feels like old times,’ she said cautiously, afraid to say the wrong thing. More afraid to say nothing at all.”

“Birdsong. A nightingale. She hears it singing a sad song. Nightingales mean loss, don’t they? Love that leaves or doesn’t last or never existed in the first place. There’s a poem about that, she thinks. An ode.”

“Vianne would not have understood that answer a year ago. She wouldn’t have understood how dark a side life could have, how hiding it was the kindest thing you could do sometimes.”