Honeydew Quotes

“What counted was how you behaved while death let you live, and how you met death when life released you.”
― Edith Pearlman, Honeydew

“Later, at four in the morning, Myron encounters his eldest son, Sean, in the kitchen. They talk about schoolwork (Sean has an imminent exam), about what Sean would like to become (a physicist and a poet). “Medio tutissimus ibis,” Sean’s father says, and the son translates, “You will be safest in the middle.” (All three boys know their Ovid.) Son and father regard each other, and Myron says, or perhaps merely thinks, the following: “My son, I remember when our family was only you and your mother and I. . . . I remember when this refrigerator was hung with your nursery drawings. I remember when you put your child’s hand so gently against Leo’s infant cheek, silk touching silk, I remember so much, I would keep you here until morning telling you, beloved boy, but now I must go to bed.”
― Edith Pearlman, Honeydew

“It was as if she had once been almost smothered and then allowed to live only if she limited her vocabulary and breathed hardly at all.”
― Edith Pearlman, Honeydew: Stories