A Hundred Small Lessons Quotes

“All the things they'd brought into this house; all of Elsie's things, packed up and taken away. A world delineated by this ebb and flow of items. The stuff of people's lives.”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“They'd had a long chat, Elsie Gormley and this house, more than sixty years of it. It had witnessed all her tempers, all her moods, and usually improved them. It held her voice, her husband's, her children's, and now their children's in turn - echoes and repetitions lodged in around the baseboards, around the window frames like those pale motes of dust that had wedged at the edge of the kitchen floor.”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“Maybe everyone had that one thing that would tempt them—in her case, the sight of an artist’s arm rising and falling as it brought a new version of her into being. And if you caught sight of that, in the right place at the right time, then some new bubble of possibility opened out, and some extraordinary thing unfolded.”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“Once in a while, she let herself dream that the Elsie in the painting was off with Ida, on her adventures, together somehow. Now, with Clem’s strange-feeling hand in hers, it occurred to her for the first time that the canvas might be anywhere—she might be hanging on her own in some dark hall, or filed away and forgotten, out of sight. And then it also struck her that she, the real Elsie, might now go anywhere too. She swallowed a sound like a sob, and heard an echo of it in the night: the strange and mournful shriek of a curlew. It was impossible not to interpret the sound as grief or loss or suffering. That is the right noise to make now, she thought, fierce and alone.”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“For his first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“That line in Shakespeare, you know: ‘there was a star danced, and under that was I born,’ ” she’d once told him. “That’s the only Shakespeare I remember from school.”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“there were spirits who traveled ahead of you in time, doing the things you’d do next. Alone in the house, she stood still to remember their name. Not a doppelgänger. Not an alter ego. Vardøger: that was it. It was Norwegian. She’d typed a paper for someone once—a professor in London, who specialized in Norse mythology—and she’d liked the sound of these creatures. “They never threaten, never frighten,” he told her. “Some people hear the vardøger; some people see them. Perhaps you hear something busily going about its business and doing whatever it does. And then, a short while later, the person themself arrives, and does all those things. It’s like a premonition, a future self.”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“So she shifted her gaze inside the night-sky dome of her mind and watched different parts of her life pass by. Through a window she watched people dance. She watched a tram move along a street. She watched a painter mix her colors. And the night spun into day and the rest of the time still to come......It wasn't so bad, she supposed. She'd just lie here, quite quietly, and wait.....Maybe this was how she'd finally get home.”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“Time lapse photography, Nan," she'd said. "You compress time - take a single shot every couple of minutes, and then run it together like film." She had another project that showed dresses being made, the fabric seeming to leap through the stages from cutting to sewing to fitting to catwalk in less than a minute....That was what life felt like now.”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“ So this is parenthood, he thought. You behave better than you might for the sake of your kid. ”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“When she was small and at home on a rare sick day, she'd never quite trusted that her classroom would be there, with the day and its lessons going on, if she wasn't. "Solipsism": nine letters. Of course Ben had known the word.....It was how the rest of the world felt sometimes now that she was someone's mum. As if almost everywhere and everything else had disappeared. Sometimes, that wasn't so bad.”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“He had loved her without question and he had loved her without pause; she was certain of that. He had thought the best of her always; he'd brought her the one life sh'd wanted. Who would she be now, she wondered, without him? Who was Elsie Gormley if Clem Gormley's idea of her was no longer alive?”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“He felt the room's walls solid around him. This house, his wife, his kids: that was what defined him. He sought no purchase on the world beyond these things.”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“Some girl once read me a poem," Ben said after a while, as the kettle sang, "about all the things we can remember from all the other lives we've had, for forty days after we're born. 'Some great forty-day daydream," he pulled the line from the crevasses of his memory, and he wasn't sure how, "before we bury the maps.' Maybe it's not forty days; maybe it's all your dreams in childhood, bits of memory you can't decipher because they belong to a person you no longer are....”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“... I just think it's funny the way my brain tries to make sense of strange places by imagining its people are familiar.”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“Is that what it feels like, coming here? Like a crazy decision that took you away and made you some lesser version of yourself?”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“Because color meant life - humans, or animals, or plants, with their different petals, their changeable leaves, the way their chlorophyll pulsed bright and vital with the warmth of the sun.”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“I will say this once," her mother said. "You can put your foot down about this. You can have your tantrum. But get used to the fact that you're going to be a mother - and no matter how much you've been in control of all the other parts of your life, you're about to enter into a thing that you can never control entirely. Ever.”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“He was never able, really, to see things other than the way they were, he believed, and he took some pride in that.”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons

“Houses could feel so different when you had them to yourself.”
― Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons