Nancy

“THE HOUSE SEEMED UTTERLY deserted. Compared to the Christmases of his childhood there was something unforgiving about Leyville now. Montignac’s aunt, Ann, had always made the house seem incredibly festive, with an enormous Christmas tree in the downstairs hallway that stretched halfway up the house, past the staircase, in the direction of the first-floor bedrooms. The mantelpieces were always covered with holly and cards; stockings were pinned by the fireplace. Wrapping paper and presents were to be found in every nook and cranny. There was nothing like that now, just the stark emptiness of the rest of the year and the echoing silence of generations that had passed through the house and died.”
― John Boyne, Next of Kin

“All letters, old and new, are the still-existing parts of a life. To read them now is to be present when some discovery of truth—or perhaps untruth, some flash of light—is just occurring. It is clamorous with the moment’s happiness or pain. To come upon a personal truth of a human being however little known, and now gone forever, is in some way to admit him to our friendship. What we’ve been told need not be momentous, but it can be as good as receiving the darting glance from some very bright eye, still mischievous and mischief-making, arriving from fifty or a hundred years ago.”
― Suzanne Marrs, What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell

“Wisdom begins in listening; listening begins in silence; silence is rooted in solitude.”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“People go, you know. It’s only you that remains. That’s the way it will be. That’s certain at least. It takes years to learn to be still.”
― Joy Williams, State of Grace