M. Meyer > M.'s Quotes

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“There is a Dutch word, uitwaaien, “to walk against the wind for pleasure.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“Once Henry had heard a crying noise at sea, and had seen a mermaid floating on the ocean's surface. The mermaid had been injured by a shark. Henry had pulled the mermaid out of the water with a rope, and she had died in his arms..."what language did the mermaid speak?" Alma wanted to know, imagining that it like almost have to be Greek. "English!" Henry said. "By God, plum, why would I rescue a deuced foreign mermaid?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“Astonishingly, at some point, a sputtering torch was thrust into her hands. Alma did not see who gave it to her. She had never before been entrusted with fire. The torch spit sparks and sent chunks of flaming tar spinning into the air behind her as she bolted across the cosmos-the only body in the heavens who was not held to a strict elliptical path.

Nobody stopped her.

She was a comet.

She did not know that she was not flying.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“I will tell you why we have these extraordinary minds and souls, Miss Whittaker," he continued, as though he had not heard her. "We have them because there is a supreme intelligence in the universe, which wishes for communion with us. This supreme intelligence longs to be known. It calls out to us. It draws us close to its mystery, and grants us these remarkable minds, in order that we try to reach for it. It wants us to find it. It wants union with us, more than anything.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent–and working at a pace so slow–that I would be able to hear myself living.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“Take me someplace where we can be silent together.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“The old cobbler had believed in something he called "the signature of all things"-namely, that God had hidden clues for humanity's betterment inside the design of every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth. All the natural world was a divine code, Boehme claimed, containing proof of our Creator's love.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“It was a long time ago now. And it was yesterday.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Her heart swelled with the high holiness of it all. Imminence was all around. She was both warrior and shining spear. She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Time is construct, in relativity every thing flows, no past or present, only the now.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Sweet sixteen," Hugh said, kissing her affectionately. "Happy birthday, little bear. Your future's all ahead of you." Ursula still harbored the feeling that some of her future was also behind her but she had learned not to voice such things.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Dr. Kellet himself wore a three-piece Harris tweed suit strung with a large gold fob watch. He smelled of cloves and pipe tobacco and had a twinkly look about him as if he were going to toast muffins or read a particularly good story to her, but instead he beamed at Ursula and said, "So, I hear you tried to kill your maid?" (Oh, that's why I'm here, Ursula thought.)”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Love at first sight, she wrote giddily to Millie. But of course such feelings weren't 'true' love (that was what she would feel for a child one day), merely the false grandeur of madness.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Needs must, and so on.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“The mind is a fathomless mystery.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Butter was plastered on to the roll with no regard for the hard labor of the cow”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“It was the kind of summer evening that made Ursula want to be alone. 'Oh,' Izzie said, 'You're at an age when a girl is simply consumed by the sublime.' Ursula wasn't sure what she meant ('No one is ever sure what she means,' Sylvie said) but she thought she understood a little. There was a strangeness in the shimmering air, a sense of imminence that made Ursula's chest feel full, as if her heart was growing. It was a kind of high holiness - she could think of no other way of describing it. Perhaps it was the future, she thought, coming nearer all the time.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“A simple acceptance of what comes to us, regarding it as neither bad nor good.
“Werde, der du bist, as he would have it,” Dr Kellet continued ... “It means become who you are,” he said.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“She had been here before. She had never been here before. There was always something just out of sight, just around a corner, something she could never chase down—something that was chasing her down.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“There were other war veterans in the neighborhood, visible thanks to their limps or missing limbs. All those unclaimed arms and legs lost in the fields of Flanders - Ursula imagined them pushing roots down into the mud and shoots up to the sky and growing once again into men. An army of men marching back for revenge.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Time isn’t circular,” she said to Dr. Kellet. “It’s like a… palimpsest.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Lily was a Fabian, a society suffragette who risked nothing for her beliefs.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them, all seemed at odds with the men they were supposed to become.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Sylvie was surprised by the rabid patriotism of the women on the platform, surely war should make pacifists of all women?”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Everything changes and nothing remains still. PLATO, Cratylus”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“she could see Sylvie and her friends on the lawn below, their dresses fluttering like moths in the encroaching dusk.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Life is too precious to be unhappy.’ Ursula wondered how many people across London were saying the same thing that night. Perhaps in less salubrious surroundings. And there would be others, of course, who would be saying the same words to cleave to what they already had, not to discard it on a whim. Suddenly”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“They’re definitely going to declare war tomorrow. In the morning. It’s probably timed so that the nation can get down on its collective knees in church and pray for deliverance.’ ‘Oh, yes, war is always so Christian, isn’t it?”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life