The Summer Guest Quotes

“Others may use one’s blindness to find a place of comfort.”
― Alison Anderson, The Summer Guest

“How she had struggled with the language but learned all the while something completely unexpected and equally precious: another way of seeing the world. It was as if material things no longer had any value except as markers of memory; all the familiar concepts of wealth, ambition, power, success, had seemed to fade away, irrelevant. She had been dipped into a rough poetry of everyday life and come out not exactly speaking Russian but versed in an idiom of pleasure in simple things, in sudden friendship, in an almost mystical perception of something deeper and inexplicably vital.”
― Alison Anderson, The Summer Guest

“You must bend, bend to the will of circumstances.”
― Alison Anderson, The Summer Guest

“You take the words, she thought; by themselves, individually, they are almost meaningless. You take them one by one and you build not only a description, a vision, but also a memory, where you are present, and he is present, too, though neither of you is described by those words. What sort of magic was this?”
― Alison Anderson, The Summer Guest

“The music was scraping me from within, but I needed it more than anything. To prove to myself that I am still alive, to witness the alchemy that turns sadness to a beauty I can still see.”
― Alison Anderson, The Summer Guest

“There’s something to be said for naïveté. Up to a point in life, anyway. When did you lose it, do you suppose—was it a person or an event?”
― Alison Anderson, The Summer Guest

“To be dissatisfied in the present moment—what a torment that must be, constantly pursuing one with doubt and disappointment. I”
― Alison Anderson, The Summer Guest