Lost Lake Quotes

“After you finish a book, the story still goes on in your mind. You can never change the beginning. But you can always change the end.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“Don't you wish you could take a single childhood memory and blow it up into a bubble and live inside it forever?”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“She understood that the hardest times in life to go through were when you were transitioning from one version of yourself to another.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“When your cup is empty, you do not mourn what is gone. Because if you do, you will miss the opportunity to fill it again.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“Eby knew all too well that there was a fine line when it came to grief. If you ignore it, it goes away, but then it always comes back when you least expect it. If you let it stay, if you make a place for it in your life, it gets too comfortable and it never leaves. It was best to treat grief like a guest. You acknowledge it, you cater to it, then you send it on its way.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“You can't change where you came from, but you can change where you go from here.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“If we measured life in the things that almost happened, we wouldn’t get anywhere.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“Misfits need a place to get away, too. All that trying to fit in is exhausting.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“Magic is what we invent when we want something we think we can't have.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“But relying on one person for your every need is so dangerous. One set of hands isn't enough to keep you from falling.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“Children always know when their mothers are crazy - they just never admit it, not out loud, to anyone.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“One thing Billy knew that most people don't know is that the longer you have a wish, the closer you get to it becoming true. Most people never get what they want because they change what they want, change it into something more practical or reachable. ...Billy felt sorry for the other people who gave up their wishes so easily.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“The world was not like him and was not going to change for him. The trick to getting through life, she'd told him, is not to resent it when it isn't exactly how you think it should be.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“She knew him in that way you can only know a person you remember as a child, like if you cracked away the adult shell, you'd find that child happily sitting inside, smiling at you.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“Once he'd asked, "Don't you want to read? There are hundreds of books in the sitting room."

She had laughed and said, "I've read them all. I want to remember them the way they were. If I read them now, the endings will have changed.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“We are conduits for happiness.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“He wasn't used to people saying no, and Eby felt sorry for him, the way she'd always felt sorry for those who had everything and it still wasn't enough.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“You can't change where you come from, but you can change where you go from here. Just like a book. If you don't like the ending, you can make up a new one.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“Bulahdeen ignored her. "I taught literature for nearly forty years. The books I read when I was twenty completely changed when I read them when I was sixty. You know why? Because the endings changed. After you finish a book, the story still goes on in your mind. You can never change the beginning. But you can always change the end. That's what's happening here.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“being mad at someone for acting exactly the way you assume they’ll act is no one’s fault but your own.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“They were wounded. They were victims. If only they had everything they'd ever wanted, then they'd be okay. But because they didn't, it was everyone else's fault.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“But he’d loved only Eby. You didn't need a mirror to tell you that you were beautiful when you had proof like that.”
― Sarah Addison Allen "Lost Lake", Lost Lake

“They made her think of her grandmere, who had lost her husband and two of her sons in the war. She had cried every day for a year, walking the same stretch of road from her home to the train station, waiting for them to come home. Her tears fell as black stones to the ground, and to this day those stones lodged in car tires and let all the air out slowly in a wail.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“Old hands can hold memories of good things.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“She'd spent enough time in this life to know that not everything will go your way. She'd read enough books to know that they weren't all happy endings.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“It was a remarkable realization to Eby, that we are what we're taught. That was why the Morris women were what they were. It was because they knew no different.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“There was such a feeling of peace around them, it was soft and pink and smelled of butter.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“...they all watched Devin run up to meet the other girls. For a moment Kate felt indescribably sad, because she couldn't go with Devin back to her childhood. She could only stand here as an adult as the distance became greater and greater until, finally, there was an ocean between them.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“Kate picked up the carafe and poured some coffee into a cup. She added sugar and cream until it was the color of caramel. Her mom used to take her coffee like this. 'So sweet it could kiss you,' she used to say.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“If you don’t like the ending, you make up a new one.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake