Landfalls Quotes

“If only men could do this - shed from their bodies and their selves the things that would destroy them.”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls

“Who are we to take possession of this place?" he said. "These people have lived here for hundreds of years. Do they have no rights, simply because we have muskets?”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls

“I used to think that people suffered more over sudden, unexpected deaths than over long, protracted ones, but I no longer think so. Grief always lands heavily.”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls: A Novel

“This was the other lesson of survival as a modern Frenchman: make oneself useful outside the country.”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls

“Antoine and Marie-Anne de Lavoisier held out for Lamanon the prospect of something he had not even known he was missing till that day in May—not so much marriage between equals, although that did seem true of them, or even marriage based on love, although that was obviously the case as well, but the happy union of science and humanity within an individual, and the joy that was possible when one person, so self-integrated, encountered another such person.”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls: A Novel

“He never expressed any yearning for the past. It was the primary lesson of his eventful life, seeing him safely through the upheavals of the Revolution and the Terror, the ascendancy and fall of Napoleon, the restoration of the monarchy.”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls

“Safety is an illusion.”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls

“What a strange life, he thought, with one's head entirely buried in the relative safety of ever-present nutrition while one's back end lay exposed to whatever might befall in the great oceans, including, at the last, the naturalist's indelicate tweezers dragging one out from dark sustenance into light and death.”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls

“Every house is witness to human misery," he declared. "That's what a house is for.”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls

“Something about that—the shared knowledge and the inability to communicate about it—had been soothing.”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls: A Novel

“You never think, they say, You need to think. But really, I am always thinking. What they mean is, Do what we tell you to, do it more, do it sooner—which has nothing to do with thinking.”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls: A Novel

“He had met such men before: men who craved discipline even when they raged against it.”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls: A Novel

“Which is worse—violent death at the hands of natives whose language and anger you do not understand, or violent death at the hands of fellow citizens whose language and anger you thought you shared?”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls: A Novel

“Over the years his memories of the expedition hadn’t just dimmed, as memories do; they’d lost the pressure of authenticity. More and more they seemed like someone else’s memories.”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls: A Novel

“as hope faded, grief had not taken its place—as if grief had its appointed season beyond which it became unavailable to experience.”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls: A Novel

“The memory of the La Borde brothers still stung, as if the losses sustained in his youth, before he’d learned to protect himself from attachment, would never quite heal.”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls: A Novel