The Versions of Us Quotes

“he is old enough now to know happiness for what it is: brief and fleeting, not a state to strive for, to seek to live in, but to catch when it comes, and to hold on to for as long as you can.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“People bear loneliness every day. They think they won't be able to, that they won't survive, but somehow one second slips into another, becomes an hour, a day, a week, and they are still living. They are still alone, even in the middle of a crowd of people. Even with a partner, a child.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“Sometimes he fantasised that at the end of his life, he would be shown a home movie of all the roads he had not taken, and where they would have led.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“But life is for living, isn't it? We all have to find some way to carry on.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“You walked into my life when I was nineteen years old. You were the only man I ever loved - the only man I ever hope to love. You took everything we did together, everything we were to each other, and scorched it to nothing: left it a cloud of ash.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“He stands for a moment before opening the studio door, looking down at the beach, flooded with a disorienting happiness; and he savours it, drinks it in, because he is old enough now to know happiness for what it is: brief and fleeting, not a state to strive for, to seek to live in, but to catch when it comes, and to hold on to for as long as you can.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“she thought of all the years that had led up to this—all those seconds and minutes and hours, spent elsewhere, with others, doing other things; none of them wasted, or regretted, but none more precious to her than this moment now.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“And then they walk away together, out of the allotted grooves of their afternoons and into the thickening shadows of evening, into the dim, liminal place where on path is taken, and another missed.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“Now do you understand,' he said, 'you were with me all along?”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“The awful truth was that Jim was happy: not in some bland, superficial way - fixed Kodak smiles under the bluest of skies - but in his deepest self. This kind of happiness was less a state, he realised, than a form of honesty: a sense of essential rightness.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“How dreadful, Eva thinks, that her life should be defined only in relation to the men she loved.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“What would my life have been without you?”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“Ours was a good love, Eva tells him in her mind. Not the giddy love of teenagers, or that of a married couple in middle age, frayed by work, home, children, by the hue and cry of the everyday; but its own, pure thing, true to itself, answerable to no one, to nothing. If”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“As they talk, Eva has the sense that she is drifting further and further from the room, into a borderless place where time fractures, loosens, and there is only this man, this conversation, this inexplicable sense of profound connection. There is no other way she can describe it, though she is not yet trying to describe it to herself—she is simply here, intensely aware of the moment”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“Opportunities lost, I suppose,’ she says. ‘Yes. Opportunities lost.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“He never tried anything other than to kiss her, hold her hand; often, in his company, she felt boredom rise in her like a stifled yawn.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“But each morning, when Eva wakes, she knows exactly who he is, and the knowledge of it leaves her with a faint, peculiar sense of longing: peculiar because it is for a man, a life, that she has never known, and surely never will.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“That's what marriage is, isn't it? Taking the rough with the smooth. At least, that's what it should be.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“But then he'd lived long enough to understand the futility of expecting anything at all”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“He has heard about the strangeness of newborns, how they seem like shrunken old men and women, carrying as they do the inchoate knowledge of what comes before;”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“He stands for a moment before opening the studio door, looking down at the beach, flooded with a disorientating happiness; and he savours it, drinks it in, because he is old enough now to know happiness for what it is: brief and fleeting, not a state to strive for, to seek to live in, but to catch when it comes, and to hold on to for as long as you can.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“It is as if, when they are together, they exist only in the eternal present. And he knows, in the deepest part of himself, that this very fact carries its own particular allure: that it may never be matched by the humdrum rhythms of the everyday.”
― Laura Barnett, Versiones de nosotros (Alianza Literaria (AL))

“I’ve been thinking about Plato’s cave, about that terrible idea that most of us spend our lives with our backs to the light, watching shadows on the wall. What if my life with David is just that? Suppose it’s simply not the real thing?”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“She watches his face, and it strikes Eva, with a certainty that she can’t possibly explain—she wouldn’t even want to try—that this is the moment: the moment after which nothing will ever be quite the same again.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“He will never be able to make Sinclair understand, really understand, that the darkness lived inside Vivian, and that although she feared it, hated it, there were moments, too, when she wanted nothing more than to dive down into it, allow its waters to close up over her head.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“For all the years he has spent without her are dulling now, losing their shape and colour -- as if he were sleepwalking through them, and has only just remembered what it is like to be fully awake.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“Then, like now, she had lingered on the brink of a decision, and had not found in his favour. Now, perhaps, she has. He should not say yes. Eva”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“to leave it to Eva to tell his daughter that David has gone, and will not be coming back. The anger will come, Eva knows – she is already dimly aware of it, but from a distance, as if viewed from the wrong end of a telescope. For now, there is only this deadening sense of calm.”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us

“make of Sinclair – she suspected he felt a certain filial resentment”
― Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us