Jennifer Ryan > Jennifer's Quotes

“Grief feels a lot like fear. We’re afraid of it taking us over. But we owe it to ourselves, to those we have lost, to let grief in. Only then can we start to remember them with a cheer in our heart, a cheer for them and all that they were.”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Spies of Shilling Lane

“If we don't think about our death until we die, how can we decide how we want to live?”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

“And I realized that this is what it's like to be an adult, learning to pick from a lot of bad choices and do the best you can with that dreadful compromise. Learning to smile, to put your best foot forward, when the world around you seems to have collapsed in its entirety, become a place of isolation, a sepia photograph of its former illusion.”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

“She didn't say anything, just a long, quiet "shhhh," as if she had learned that the troubles of the world could be absorbed and deafened by slow, steady wistfulness, and I suddenly understood that she'd been silencing the noise for the past twenty years.”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

“Then I looked out onto the horizon myself and realized that loss is the same wherever you go: overwhelming, inexorable, deafening. How resilient human beings are that we can learn slowly to carry on when we are left all alone, left to fill the void as best we can. Or disappear into it.”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

“I took a deep breath of the syrupy sweetness of summer, suffused with bees and birds, and I thought to myself how beautiful this world can be. How lucky we are to be here, to be part of it, for however long we have.”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

“Human nature defeats me sometimes, how greed and spite can lurk so divisively around the utmost courage and sacrifice.”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

“A sense of responsibility— or was it guilt?— hung over me, that I was in some way at fault because of cowering to all these pompous men all these years, when I should have had the bravery to reclaim my own mind. That if we women had done this years ago, before the last war, before this one, we’d be in a very different world.”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

“I sometimes wonder if we need to understand where we came from to feel our way forward. How can you expect a plant to grow if you cut off its roots?”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Spies of Shilling Lane