Susan Ecker > Susan's Quotes

“And all the while I am aware of a larger despair, as if Helen & I are vessels for the despair of all women and many men too. Who are we and where are we going? Why are we, with all our ‘progress,’ so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes—characters even—caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you. Well, it was like that. All”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“but I have come to see that when two people work closely together on a joint project—two intelligent people, I mean to say—a bond of communication develops between them that can enhance their work. All the while they are jointly engaged on a task, they are aware of, acutely sensitive to, each other’s tiniest movements, and can interpret them accordingly.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Even in their brief time together, Nora had come to understand the difference between infatuation and love. Infatuation was weather. Love was climate.”
― Lisa Grunwald, Time After Time

“When she had taken his hand that day, the first time she had met him, she had felt—what? Something of which she had never known the like. Something she would never have expected to find in the hand of a clean-booted grammar-school boy from town. It was far-reaching: this much she knew. It had layers and strata, like a landscape. There were spaces and vacancies, dense patches, underground caves, rises and descents. There wasn’t enough time for her to get a sense of it all—it was too big, too complex. It eluded her, mostly. She knew there was more of it than she could grasp, that it was bigger than both of them. A sense, too, that something was tethering him, holding him back; there was a tie somewhere, a bond, that needed to be loosened or broken, before he could fully inhabit this landscape, before he could take command.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

“and know all, in only a moment. “Is it?” his mother says, her face white, stretched. “Is it what?” he says, feeling skittish and a little mad, therefore unable to keep himself from lapsing into verbal sparring. “Yours.” “Is what mine?” he returns, almost gleefully. Mary presses her lips together. “Did you put it there?” “Did I put what where?” At this point he is aware of Agnes turning her head to look at him—he can imagine her dark eyes on him, assessing, gathering information, like a spool gathers thread—but he still can’t stop.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

“Aronowitz twirled in his chair and scurried into the workshop in the back, to more grunts. He reminded Carney of a squirrel in the park, darting helter-skelter after lost nuts. Maybe the other squirrels of Radio Row understood this behavior, but it was animal madness to this civilian.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“It was the last time he raised his hand. The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn’t have to live the way you’d been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“Marie has a swift vision of herself as a tiny figure, climbing the walls; oh someday she will find her way over the queen’s rampart, someday she will be inside, out of the wind. Eleanor will be a model, then, Marie thinks, for her own purpose on the earth, at this abbey she hates so much. She will build around herself walls of wealth and friends and good clear reputation, she will make her frail sisters safe within. Marie will mold herself in the queen’s form, she thinks.”
― Lauren Groff, Matrix