So Long, See You Tomorrow Quotes

“What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“It seemed like a mistake. And mistakes ought to be rectified, only this one couldn't be. Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn't be crossed. I had to find an explanation other than the real one, which was that we were no more immune to misfortune than anybody else, and the idea that kept recurring to me...was that I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn't have gone through and couldn't get back to the place I hadn't meant to leave. Actually, it was other way round: I hadn't gone anywhere and nothing was changed, so far as the roof over our heads was concerned, it was just that she was in the cemetery.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“Whether they are part of a home or home is a part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen–the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washing day, of wool drying in the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops.
His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-back copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too, while you are at it.
Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn too–the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice,”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“They looked at me, and were so full of delight in the pleasure they were giving me that some final thread of resistance gave way and I understood not only how entirely generous they were but also that generosity might be the greatest pleasure there is.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“Without the heavy set aristocratic man snoring away on his side of the bed, without the fresh-eyed child whose hair ribbon needs retying; without the conversation at meals and the hearty appetites and getting dressed for church on time; without the tears of laughter or the worry about making both ends meet, the unpaid bills, the layoffs, both seasonal and unexpected; without the toys that have to picked up lest somebody trip over them, and the seven shirts that have to be washed and ironed, one for every day in the week; without the scraped knee and the hurt feelings, the misunderstandings that need to be cleared up, the voices calling for her so that she is perpetually having to stop what she is doing and go see what they want - without all this, what have you? A mystery: How is it that she didn't realize it was going to last such a short time?”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“A gentleman doesn't have one set of manners for the house of a poor man and another for the house of someone with an income incomparable to his own.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“It seemed like a mistake. And mistakes ought to be rectified, only this one couldn't be. Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn't be crossed.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory - meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion - is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“It would have been a help if at some time Baptist preacher, resting his forearms on the pulpit and hunching his shoulders, had said People neither get what they deserve nor deserve what they get. The gentle and the trusting are trampled on. The rich man usually forces his way through the eye of the needle, and there is little or no point in putting your faith in Divine Providence. . . . On the other hand, how could any preacher, Baptist or otherwise, say this?”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn’t be crossed.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“But he was careful. He didn’t make a simple remark without rehearsing it beforehand. And he continually removed the expression from his face lest it be the wrong one, and give him away. He also avoided any strong light, such as the lamp on the kitchen table. Sometimes a weakness overcame him, his legs were unstrung, and he had to find some place to sit down, but this was easy enough to disguise. It was his voice that gave him the most trouble. It sounded false to him and not like his voice at all.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“Sometimes she goes out to work as a practical nurse, and comes home and sits by the kitchen table soaking her feet in a pan of hot water and Epsom salts. When she gets into bed and the springs creak under her weight, she groans with the pleasure of lying stretched out on an object that understands her so well.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“They had stopped shouting at each other and put their faith in legal counsel. With the result that how things could be made to look was what counted, not how they actually were.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“He is lying on his left side, in the fetal position, as if he is trying to get out of this world by the way he came in.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“Other children could have borne it, have borne it. My older brother did, somehow. I couldn't.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“Other people, with nothing at stake, see there is a look of sadness about her, as if she lives too much in the past or perhaps expects more of life than is reasonable.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“The simple truth is that though so much is made of the woman's beauty in love stories, passion does not require it. Plato's idea that lovers were originally one person, the two parts having become separated and desiring to be joined, is as good an explanation as any for what cannot in the mind of an outsider ever be convincingly accounted for.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“There is a limit, surely, to what one can demand of one's adolescent self. And to go on feeling guilty about something that happened so long ago is hardly reasonable. I do feel guilty, even so. A little. And always will, perhaps, whenever I think about him. But it isn't only my failure that I think about. I also wonder about him, about what happened to him.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“There is a door, but it is standing open, permanently. If you were to walk through it and didn't like what was on the other side you could turn and come back to the place you started from. What is done can be undone.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“Her eyelids were closed but Fern wasn't asleep. She knew that she slept sometimes, because she passed in and out of dreaming. Daybreak was a comfort.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“He knew what had been done to him but not what he had done to deserve it.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“He hated himself for being weak, for having no will, but it wasn't that he didn't try to overcome the feelings he knew he shouldn't have. Time after time he though he had overcome them, and it always turned out that he hadn't.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“He said silently (but nevertheless wanting to be heard) 'Clarence, you ought not to trust me' ... half expecting Clarence to have answer 'Why not?' If Clarence had, then he would have said 'Because all my life I've been a stranger to myself.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow