The Forgotten Room Quotes

“My mother once told me that a lifetime of good enough was a fair price to pay for a single moment of pure happiness. This is my moment. Don't take that away from me.”
― Beatriz Williams, The Forgotten Room

“Do I want to know where I came from? Yes. But that doesn’t impact who I want to be.”
― Karen White, The Forgotten Room

“Well, that's the thing about choices, isn't it? There are always more to make. I've never seen a street where you couldn't cross to the other side.”
― Beatriz Williams, The Forgotten Room

“My mother once told me that a lifetime of good enough was a fair price to pay for a single moment of pure happiness.”
― Karen White, The Forgotten Room

“Is your father,” Margie completed for me. “Which makes Prunella Pratt your father’s stepmother, which I suppose means that Harry Pratt was your stepgrandfather? Or something like that.”
― Karen White, The Forgotten Room

“and whether you could force happiness on yourself, simply by arranging your mouth in a happy expression.”
― Karen White, The Forgotten Room

“(He remembered resting against her afterward, listening to the beat of her heart, taking her breath into his lungs, and thinking that he was the luckiest man in the world, that you couldn't connect with a human being any more perfectly than that. And sure enough, he'd been right.)”
― Beatriz Williams, The Forgotten Room

“This was what she couldn't get enough of, not if she lived forever: Harry on her skin, Harry's grateful kisses on her neck, Harry and Olive, teeming and sated, brimming over with each other, as if this house and this world had been built by God's hands for their love alone.”
― Beatriz Williams, The Forgotten Room

“Except for a daily visit with the other doctors on our morning rounds, I hadn't seen or spoken to him. But that didn't mean I didn't miss him like the winter earth missed the sun.”
― Beatriz Williams, The Forgotten Room

“He didn't have to explain what it was. It was there between them, that invisible bond, that strange sense of ease, as though she had known him always. As if her life would be immeasurably the worse for not having him in it.”
― Beatriz Williams, The Forgotten Room

“I find a woman with brains enormously attractive and not threatening in the least. A pretty face is nice, too, but having somebody to converse with and share thoughts for thirty or forty years is very appealing to me.”
― Beatriz Williams, The Forgotten Room

“John Ravenel lifted a billiard ball, turned it between his fingers. Light winked off the surface. “Do I want to know where I came”
― Karen White, The Forgotten Room

“Didn’t it belong to her just a little bit, not in a material way but in the way a house always belonged to all those who had lived and loved and suffered in it? As if it had kept behind a small part of your soul.”
― Karen White, The Forgotten Room

“silly plays instead of simply confronting the usurper that was Claudius: man-to-man, face-to-face”
― Karen White, The Forgotten Room

“She had always scorned Hamlet, just a little. Five acts of vacillation, scene after scene of contemplation instead of action, putting on”
― Karen White, The Forgotten Room

“Love isn't a mistake. But I know true love is rare enough that when you find it you fight for it. Marry me, Kate. Come back to Charleston with me and be with me for the rest of our lives.”
― Beatriz Williams, The Forgotten Room

“Vati, Vati, I miss you so. She didn't say it aloud, but her throat vibrated with the words.”
― Beatriz Williams, The Forgotten Room

“...the predominant odors of sauerkraut and schnitzel that had always made me feel a part of my mother's life, the part before she met my father and the brackets of disappointment that marked each side of her mouth had become permanent.”
― Beatriz Williams, The Forgotten Room

“Her father had admired her mother without ever truly understanding her. And her mother--her mother had relied on her father without appreciating him. There had been a gulf between them that couldn't be bridged by all the goodwill in the world.”
― Beatriz Williams, The Forgotten Room

“I want you to keep this. I want you to keep this in your trunk in your awful grubby room in the nunnery, and to take it out every night when I'm gone and look at it and say, Harry loves me, Harry's coming back in June to take me away to Europe, Harry's going to make up for all this work and misery and make me as happy as a man ever made a woman.”
― Beatriz Williams, The Forgotten Room

“The floorboards creaked as he stepped toward her. She counted each one, because they belonged to Harry, because the floorboards were so lucky to bear the touch of Harry's feet.”
― Beatriz Williams, The Forgotten Room

“Didn't It belong to her just a little bit, not in a material way but in the way a house always belonged to all those who have lived and loved and suffered in it? As if it had kept behind a small part of your soul.”
― Beatriz Williams, The Forgotten Room

“All her life, Olive had wanted to stay up until midnight on New Year's Eve and experience the exact instant when the old year turned to the new. When the familiar date passed into history, never to be seen or known or smelled or touched again - like death, she supposed - and those bright exotic numbers that had once belonged to some impossibly distant future - 1893, imagine that! - became your present reality.”
― Beatriz Williams, The Forgotten Room