Simla > Simla's Quotes

“I see the past as it actually was," Maeve said. She was looking at the trees.

"But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we're not seeing it as the people we were, we're seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“That night in my sister’s bed I stared at the ceiling and felt the true loss of our father. Not his money or his house, but the man I sat next to in the car. He had protected me from the world so completely that I had no idea what the world was capable of. I had never thought about him as a child. I had never asked him about the war. I had only seen him as my father, and as my father I had judged him. There was nothing to do about that now but add it to the catalog of my mistakes.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Thinking about the past impeded my efforts to be decent in the present.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“What made something precious? Losing it and finding it.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“You loved so hard and hoped so much and then you ended up with nothing. Children who no longer needed you. A husband who no longer wanted you. Nothing left but you, alone, and empty space.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You