Girl in Hyacinth Blue Quotes

“Everybody works . . . . That's what life is. Work and a little play and a lot of prayer.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“If two people love the same thing, she reasoned, then they must love each other, at least a little, even if they never say it.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“How love builds itself unconsciously, he thought, out of the momentous ordinary.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“Work is love made plain, whether man’s work or woman’s work.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“In the end, it's only the moments that we have.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“This girl, when she became a woman, would risk all, sacrifice all, overlook and endure all in order to be one with her beloved.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“The winsome lilt of Digna humming in the garden. Her knowing, almost teasing look, not quite a smile, when she knew she had the upper hand about something, and his willing acquiescence. Her coaxing in the dark next to him - What was your favorite part of the day? - to which he'd always say, because he always thought it - now, touching you. He'd feel the lump of truth form in his throat, the swell of love in his loins. And afterward, the peace of her rhythmic breathing, steady as a Frisian clock, her simple uncomposed lullaby. Those are things he would, in some final, stretched-out moment, relive. How love builds itself unconsciously, he thought, out of the momentous ordinary.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“The painting showed she did not yet know that lives end abruptly, that much of living is repetition and separation, that buttons forever need re-sewing no matter how ferociously one works the thread, that nice things almost happen.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“No one but another painter could know the delicacy required to balance the complexities, to keep reality at bay in order to remain in the innermost center of his work.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“Now he knew . . . that there was nothing so vital as paying attention, and perfecting the humble offices of love.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“Her chest ached like a dull wound when she realized that her silence did not cause him a moment's reflection or curiosity. When she looked out the corner of her eye at him, she could not tell what she meant to him... Another wish that never would come true, she saw then, even if she lived forever, was that he, that someone, would look at her not as an artistic study, but with love.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“She remembered wishing, one particular morning... that she might someday have someone to write to, that she could write at the end of a letter full of love and news, "As ever, your loving Magdalena Elisabeth.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“Never did she succumb to the cowardice of self-pity. I had fancied love a causal adjunct and not the central turning shaft making all the parts move. I had not stood astonished before the power of its turning.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“...Thank the Lord you have a man as hardworking as Stijn. Work is love made plain, whether man's or woman's work, and you're a fool if you don't recognize it.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“She wasn't at peace the way that artist painted her. She was leaning forward, and the rigidness of her spine showed the ache in her soul. She was a desperate woman with frailties just like her, temptations just liker her, a woman who had needs, a woman who loved almost to the point of there being no more her anymore, a woman who probably cried too much, just like her, a woman afraid, wanting to believe rather than believing...”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“If, indeed, that was love, it wasn't enough.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“Therefore, what I had been taught to fear I now embraced. Betrayal- his or mine, it didn't matter- freed me.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“...That I was, in fact, indifferent to my husband's indiscretions testified, to me foremost, that our love was of a tepid paleness.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“The notion of lovers living together is altogether too demanding. One can be caught so unready.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“Poor fool, ruining his life for a piece of cloth smeared with mineral paste, for a fake, I had to tell myself, a mere curiosity.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“She thought of all the people in all the paintings she had seen that day, not just Father's, in all the paintings of the world, in fact. Their eyes, the particular turn of a head, their loneliness or suffering or grief was borrowed by an artist to be seen by other people throughout the years who would never see them face to face. People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“... if one acts with sufficient passion in all things, then that passion will correct whatever might be unfortunate in one's circumstances.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“He lived so badly, it seemed, because he always came into the moment encumbered”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“There was something in this girl he could never grasp, an inner life inscrutable to him. He was in awe of the child's flights of fancy, her insatiable passion always to be running off somewhere, her active inner life.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“Her stony coldness was more convincing of the cataclysm than the dirt. Argument was as futile now as blame in Eden. I could not bear to look at her. She had cast away her soul.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“The only place Aletta and I could be together unseen was just under the rafters in the church tower, a circumstance that propelled us into an earlier intimacy than what we would have known had we been permitted to walk together Sunday afternoons under the wide sky.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“She was a desperate woman with frailties just like her, temptations just like her, a woman who had needs, a woman who loved almost to the point of there being no more her anymore, a woman who probably cried too much, just like her, a woman afraid, wanting to believe rather than believing [...]”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue

“I came to see that knowing what love isn't might be just as valuable, though infinitely less satisfying, as knowing what it is.”
― Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue