Clear Quotes

“I have the cliffs and the skerries and the birds. I have the white bill and the round bill and the peaked hill. I have the clear spring water and the rich good pasture that covers the tilted top of the island like a blanket. I have the old black cow and the sweet grass that grows between the rocks, I have my great chair and my sturdy house. I have my spinning wheel and I have the teapot and I have Pegi, and now, amazingly, I have John Ferguson too.”
― Carys Davies, Clear

“He found himself wishing he could go back and start again and do everything differently. But time was the worst thing; time, it seemed to him now, was the only thing you couldn't change; whatever you did, it kept coming.”
― Carys Davies, Clear

“You never knew in advance if a decision was the right one. All you could do was try to imagine the future and use that to help you make up your mind in a difficult situation, and if you couldn’t imagine the future, well, you had to make up your mind anyway.”
― Carys Davies, Clear

“That was how he felt: that some of the threads of himself were connected but most of them weren’t, and that he was continually on the point of joining them all together without ever managing it.”
― Carys Davies, Clear

“How is it, she thought, we never see the big things coming?”
― Carys Davies, Clear

“What seems likely is that, in his opinion, one Presbyterian minister was much the same as another—none of them, in his experience, having kicked up any sort of fuss about the removal of people from estates like his own in order for them to be replaced by sheep. Whether they'd stayed with the established Church or come out with the new one, it made no difference; they had not interfered.

Indeed, the Presbyterian doctrine of providence had proved something of a boon in clearing the people—reminding them, as it did, that the events of their lives were no more than the unfolding of God's will; that any suffering accruing from their removal was no more than divine punishment for their sins.”
― Carys Davies, Clear

“Forgive me,” he whispered, hardly knowing who he was talking to, only knowing that he was guilty.”
― Carys Davies, Clear

“Looking back, there was only one thing that was completely clear to him, and that was that he had loved the time he had spent with John Ferguson.”
― Carys Davies, Clear

“But time was the worst thing; time, it seemed to him now, was the only thing you couldn’t change; whatever you did, it kept coming.”
― Carys Davies, Clear