The Lake of Dreams Quotes

“Rows and rows of books lined the shelves and I let my eyes linger on the sturdy spines, thinking how human books were, so full of ideas and images, worlds imagined, worlds perceived; full of fingerprints and sudden laughter and the sighs of readers, too. It was humbling to consider all these authors, struggling with this word or that phrase, recording their thoughts for people they'd never meet. In that same way, the detritus of the boxes was humbling - receipts, jotted notes, photos with no inscriptions, all of it once held together by the fabric of lives now finished, gone.”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“The challenges in this place are real and sometimes very difficult, but I've learned to slow down and look for beauty in my days, for the mysteries and blessings woven into everything, into the very words we speak.”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“Rows and rows of books lined the shelves...full of ideas and images, worlds imagined, worlds perceived; full of fingerprints and sudden laughter and the sighs of readers...”
― Kim Edwards , The Lake of Dreams

“... the Iroquois take dreams very seriously. They see them as the secret wishes of the soul--the heart's desire, so to speak. Not all dreams, maybe, but the important ones. [p.254]”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“Some dreams matter, illuminate a crucial choice or reveal some intuition that's trying to push its way to the surface. Other, though, are detritus, the residue of the day reassembling itself in some disjointed and chaotic way ... Frantic dreams, they left me tired, and I woke grouchy to another rainy day, the sky so densely gray and the rain so thick that I couldn't that I couldn't see the opposite shore [p, 166]”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“Dinosaurs drank this water, did you know that? Water moves forever in a circle; someday, little ones, your grandchildren may even drink your tears.”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“It was like standing on a threshold, a door in the world that would open into a place you'd never expected to be, a place from which you couldn't return. Welcome or unwelcome, knowledge was something you could never undo.”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“in”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“I don't see how sucking the joy out of every aspect of life can be pleasing to anybody's God”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“Water moves forever in a circle; someday, little ones, your grandchildren may even drink your tears”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.   —Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“For this is what I have learned, in my short life: do not act out of anger. Act from love or not at all.”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“I wondered if I could call my experience in the chapel prayer--not a long list of asking, after all, or a rote string of words, but rather a kind of sacred listening. [p, 355]”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“Around me the beautiful windows, connecting me to other lives and other times, to things done and also deliberately left undone, stood dark. Rose, I was sure, had acted out of love, yet for Iris her mother's absence had remained an unresolved sadness at the center of her life. I thought of what Rose had written about anger, about its power to corrupt, to make a space for evil. Maybe she was right. Maybe evil, that old-fashioned word, could be called other things, disharmony or dysfunction. Maybe Rose was right and evil wasn't attached top an individual as much as if was a force in the world, a seeing force, one that worked like a self-replicating virus, seeking to entangle, to ensnare, to undo beauty. [p.353]”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“It's always like this after a few days here. I start to lose my bearings. The surface is one way, but then there are all these other things going on, sometimes going back decades, swirling undercurrents that I just don't understand. [p. 336]”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“All day she had been dreaming of the comet, its wild and fiery beauty, what it might mean, how her life might change.”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“This is what I used to think, that some people were simply good and others were not, and that I, of course, was good. But now I think instead that evil is a force in the world, a force that seeks, and it finds its way into our lives through anger and loss, through sadness and betrayal, like mold on bread, like rot on an apple, it takes hold.”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“Rows and rows of books lined the shelves and I let my eyes linger on the sturdy spines, thinking how human books were, so full of ideas and images, worlds imagined, worlds perceived; full of fingerprints and sudden laughter and the sighs of readers, too.”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“They can learn- they must learn- to appreciate the history of their good fortune through the experiences of those who not only witnessed history, but made it.”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“Sometimes loneliness is an emergency situation”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“The interwoven spheres and vines ran along the bottom. I'd done some research, and I'd found this motif everywhere. These overlapping circles were ancient, tracing back to Pythagorean geometry--geometry, a measure of the world. In more mystical terms, the shape had always evoked tghe place where world overlap: dreaming with waking, death with life, the visible with the unseen. [p. 362]”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“There was so much force and beauty in the windows, such unsettled sadness in what little I knew of Rose's life, all her longing, her distance from her daughter. Just knowing she had existed opened new and uneasy possibilities within my understanding of the story I'd always thought I'd known by heart. ... Whoever Rose had been, she was gone, unable to speak for herself, fading into the past as surely as these rainy colors were diffusing, even now [p. 142].”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“The world beyond the water was a blue of green and stone and blue. A moment later Yoshi pushed through, the water pouring down in sheets so smooth it looked like glass, and stepped into the calm [p. 296]”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“It shocked me, the strength of the image, the desire I had to see if it might happen this way- though I couldn't tell if it was really desire in the present or leftover from the past.”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams

“What is it you plan to do / With your one wild and precious life?” What indeed?”
― Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams