My One Hundred Adventures Quotes

“The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.”
― Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures

“We all belong here equally...Just by being born onto the earth we are accepted and the earth supports us. We don't have to be especially good. We don't have to accomplish anything. We don't even have to be healthy.”
― Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures

“Is this what it is to get older, to have adventures you can no longer tell your family because you are moving apart from them?...Or do you grow up and have adventures you tell no one? Are some adventures only yours alone?”
― Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures

“Suddenly I realize that everyone in the whole world is, at the end of a day, staring at a dusky horizon, owner of a day that no one else will ever know.”
― Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures

“Yesterday I was so full of hope. My life seemed blessed, full of adventures and answered prayers, and now something very, very bad has happened and it will never be the same again. And it all happened because I was greedy. Because I couldn't have an ordinary life. Because I was so taken with the wonders of the world that I could not be content with anything less than the constant awareness of its miracles.”
― Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures

“It's better to be fooled a hundred times than never to look.”
― Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures

“No one really understands a family but the people in it and even they each understand it differently.”
― Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures

“We can affect people around us so much with our moods. A depressed person can make a room gloomy and a sweet nature can cause the lion to lie down with the lamb.”
― Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures

“I think that it is death alone that makes things poignant.”
― Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures

“All summers take me back to the sea. There in the long eelgrass, like birds' eggs waiting to be hatched, my brothers and sister and I sit, grasses higher than our heads, arms and legs like thicker versions of the grass waving in the wind, looking up at the blue sky. My mother is gathering food for dinner: clams and mussels and the sharply salty greens that grow by the shore. It is warm enough to lie here in the little silty puddles like bathwater left in the tub after the plug has been pulled. It is the beginning of July and we have two months to live out the long, nurturing days, watching the geese and the saltwater swans and the tides as they are today, slipping out, out, out as the moon pulls the other three seasons far away wherever it takes things. Out past the planets, far away from Uranus and the edge of our solar system, into the brilliantly lit dark where the things we don't know about yet reside. Out past my childhood, out past the ghosts, out past the breakwater of the stars. Like the silvery lace curtains of my bedroom being drawn from my window, letting in light, so the moon gently pulls back the layers of the year, leaving the best part open and free. So summer comes to me.”
― Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures

“I keep staring at the bag in Mrs. Parks's hand: yellows, greens, blues, whites, pastel colors so soft they look as if they have faded in the sea. The washed colors of the sea and sleep. Pajama colors. The colors of baby clothes. In my nose is the smell of my brothers' heads after they are born. Maybe this is why people making journeys buy saltwater taffy. It gives you the lovely dreamy sense that you can start all over again from the beginning.”
― Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures