Tor Udall > Tor's Quotes

“Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees, ... one's happiness, one's reality?”
― Virginia Woolf, Monday or Tuesday

“We do not remember days, we remember moments.”
― Cesare Pavese

“Written in pain, written in awe
By a puzzled man who questioned
What we were here for

- Oh! You Pretty Things”
― David Bowie

“Just when we are safest, there's a sunset touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, someone's death,
...
The grand Perhaps!”
― Robert Browning

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Look out my window, what do I see?
A crack in the sky and a hand reaching down to me.
All the nightmares came today
And it looks as though they're here to stay.

- Oh! You Pretty Things”
― David Bowie

“The last page of a book is a sacred space that even lovers respect.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“Nothing is set in stone. A bird can be refolded into a boat, a fish, a kimono, or any other extravagant vision. At other times it aches to return to its original folds. The paper begins to fray. It tires, rebels.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“Chloe takes a mental snapshot, as if one day she will paint him. It will be a day's work getting to know his body.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“Stand in nature before anyone else has woken and most people find something to believe in.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“He looked like a painting in restoration - that at some point in his life he had been beautiful.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“Tearing the paper means you've stopped believing in the infinite possibilities of a square.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“Loving you is like learning a foreign language.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“It is a movement and a rest, you and I.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“They talked in the supermarket, the butcher's and the post office of how they had watched a child collecting twigs, or was it flowers...? How they had noticed the sky, what a blue sky there was that day. Chloe remembers her walking through the trees, the branches growing bigger until she couldn't see her any more. A child had been lost and Kew would never be the same.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“She mourns the stillbirth of anything that craves to be born. It doesn't have to be a child. It can be an artwork, an idea, or a miscarried love.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“A master of origami said he tried to express with paper the joy of life, and the last thought before a man dies.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“She can't believe she is going to compose her first love letter. She can hardly bear the exposure as if her body is a photographic film spooling into sunlight and everything is too bright, too vulnerable, the moments in the film now lost for ever.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“Among the dog leads, phones and hats, there would be babies hoped for and lost. All this would be remembered: missed opportunities, mislaid friends, the smile of a wife. It would be a place for lost things.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“I don't want to return to the world outside these Gardens. All I want is to notice the dew on a leaf. The holy busyness of worms in the soil.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“Perhaps she thought she would see a tunnel of light or an angelic choir. But the only thing she saw was every kiss she had ever experienced – and she realised she was where she wanted to be all along.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“It doesn't matter where she looks, there are always the beautiful imperfections of a marriage.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“Everyone needs company, some kind of consolation. This is the rough comfort of strangers, the sympathy of touch.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds