Fellowship Point Quotes

“But there was a last time. An unforeseen and uncommemorated last time. I don’t remember it. That, more than anything, describes aging to me—the letting go of one activity after the next, with no fanfare. Just realizing later that the last time has come and gone, Agnes said.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“Everyone who’d lost something of crucial importance wished he or she could go back to the moment when it was still theirs. The wish was so powerful it seemed it might reverse the direction of time. It bore apparitions and ghosts.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“Writing is waiting. That’s the whole of it. If you sit in your chair not doing anything else for long enough, the answer will come. You do have to be in your chair, though, ready to write it down.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“He’s a lost soul,” Elspeth said, her large eyes revealing the trustworthiness in her own soul. “He will always find a way to believe he’s right—even if he offers an apology. He’s broken, Ness. Everyone is—we all fell and broke when we were born. Some are lucky enough to understand this and devote themselves to making repairs. Others don’t see it and blame what is around them for pain that is universal in nature. John is one of those. I’m so sorry.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“Her true feeling was not that women were equal, as that in itself was a comparison, but that they were whole. Wasn’t that indisputable? All living creatures were whole. End of story. This was one of her earliest understandings of reality, and it had shaped her life.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“Nine-year-old girls are perfect humans,”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“I had been judicious in my warnings and instructions, phrasing them so as not to scare her, or inhibit her. I'm determined not to teach her to fear everything, as we were taught, or that manners are preferable to feelings. I honestly don't know yet what free is, but I know what it isn't.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“It was a red flag, Polly and Robert decided, not to have old friends.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“Stop it, she told herself. Buck up. Buck up. Things were going well. Very well. What did it matter what people thought? Robert was starting to relax. Those old women—who cared? They were as irrelevant as Polly herself was, and she was shown and told about her diminished status at every juncture.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“My other news is that I finally saw Polly alone, and it was an eventful visit. She came at noon. I spent all morning getting ready. Knowing I was soon to sit with her was a huge relief. Relief… then nothing, nothing at all. The whole of the self that has been focused on one object, one need, one occupation, when suddenly, sharply freed, can’t immediately resume its former shape. The cessation of pain bares the soul, and the soul is no person. It has no creaturehood. The frozen emotions and limbs must be thawed after a period of suspended animation, the body revived.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“He saw me notice and took my hands in his. “It’s too quiet for me, Cousin, and too dry. You understand, don’t you?” I don’t, but I was charmed, as he knew I would be, in spite of my being against charm in principle.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“I have often wondered why I’ve survived. Yet I know the answer. It’s luck. Luck is a greater factor than anyone who succeeds ever wants to believe. The idea that one is destined to be the person who remains standing, the person smart enough to make all the money, to retain the beauty, is far more seductive. If there is good luck, there is bad luck. That is a reality no one wants to contemplate. But it is reality. I am merely lucky to be alive.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“What does it matter if she breaks something, compared to her feeling as though she belongs?”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“She’d been raised not to dwell on such injustices, because dwelling made it difficult to be good company in the present. Perhaps it was necessary to dwell, though, even to be obsessive, for any real change to occur. Plenty of Quakers dwelled—the American Friends Service Committee, for example—and hadn’t that done the world a lot of good? When she got back to Haverford, she’d volunteer for something to do with animals—if Dick could spare her.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“I have cancer,” Agnes announced. She hadn’t been able to contain her rage after all. She didn’t expect it to come out that way—it just had. Her hands rose to the sides of her rib cage, a gesture left over from when there had been drains there. “You got the flowers we sent?” He’d been coming straight toward her but stopped, as if she’d announced a contagion. “Probably. Did I write a note?” He laughed. “Probably! How did this happen, though?” He shifted gears, stepped closer to her, looked her in the eye, and asked—intimately, wittily—“Have you been smoking, Cousin Nessie?” “Wouldn’t that be nice!” “Yes. I’d love to myself. I always say I’ll pick it up again at eighty. But you are eighty!” “And now I’m saying I’ll start at ninety.” “Oh, is that how it goes? I don’t know if I’ll last that long.” “That makes two of us.” His face crumpled. A little boy again. “Oh come on, Archie, if you can’t laugh at death, what can you laugh at?” She gave him a light punch on the arm. “I’ll be lucky to live to the age you are now,” he said awkwardly. “Yes. It is fortunate. Everything becomes very clear.” “But you still feel young, don’t you?” “Are you kidding? I feel old as the hills and twice as dusty, as my mother would say.” “You better come see the view immediately, in that case.” He hovered his hand under her elbow and moved her forward.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“Polly, who made a point of finding the good in everyone, didn’t like Seela either. She practiced a set of showy good manners that were actually bad manners, such as explaining why she couldn’t accept an invitation or complimenting someone’s dress. She’d even brought some sort of loaf to a luncheon at Gay Burk’s. “It’s a pound cake with lime zest,” she’d said to the assembled group. Gay received it as if she’d been handed a dead squirrel, and rushed it to the kitchen, where it disappeared and was never heard from again. Polly wished Agnes had been there to see Gay’s face, but Agnes never went out in the day due to her writing.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“Marriage should be a long conversation leading to freedom”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“The leaves have mostly fallen, so the pines are having their glorious reign.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“father-daughter relationship is unique in the kind of delight it brings to both persons, a proprietary pride that also contains an understanding of the boundaries that hold the two”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“When they were little, they recited the names of the houses from the bottom of Fellowship Point to the top in a singsong. WesterLee, Meadowlea, Leeward Cottage, Rock Reed, Outer Light. Polly taught the ditty to her children. It hurt her heart that she couldn’t remember Lydia’s voice. They hadn’t even made a recording. Polly looked over at the large gray shingle-style cottage with its deeply sloped roof and angled wings and walled porches and half columns set on shingled balustrades. It was thought to be the best house on the Point architecturally: William had done his brother that favor when he drew the designs. Polly knew it well from going over daily when James was in residence every August. “I’d rather not,” Polly said. “It’s trespassing.” “On Archie? You actually care about him today of all days? Anyway no”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“this nation is built on race, and this world is built on sexism.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“Thoughts are real, but they aren’t sins,” she’d said with absolute finality. “Only actions qualify as sins. Though there is no such thing as sin.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“You can’t have a novel without a conflict,” she said, thoughtfully. “People have tried,” I said, “but one of the fascinations is to see how others solve problems.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“Funny how young people both wanted to be original and loved tradition, especially when it wasn’t their own, and satisfied both tendencies by borrowing the traditions of others.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“But simplicity turned out, over and over, to be the most obscuring disguise. What greater intellectual challenge was there than to recognize the simple?”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“To believe in nothing, to have no need of belief—that was growing up.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“What was the biological purpose of humans having such a vast capacity for denying reality?”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“Alone, literally, yet she was choosing words with the intention that they serve as stepping stones between herself and the mind and heart of another person. It was a miracle that this was possible. Small black marks on a page, a code called the alphabet, and she could read a story written hundreds of years earlier, or write a book read thousands of miles away. Why get excited about gods and ghosts when writing and reading were so supernatural?”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“yet she had a very particular way of being a feminist, a central tenet of which was not to mimic traditionally masculine behaviors.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

“People had no manners anymore, or even a notion of their utility—how good manners evened out the imbalances between personalities, how they bolstered the shy by making it clear what to do, and how they held the aggressive in check.”
― Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point