Hello Beautiful Quotes

“What do you want? Sylvie wouldn’t have asked this question before, because she would have been afraid of the answer, but she wanted to be deeply and truly herself and to experience the world in the deepest and truest way.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“It occurred to him, for the first time, that just because you never thought about someone didn’t mean they weren’t inside you.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“She was all of herself with him and even felt there was room for her to become more. When he rested his eyes on her, it was without judgment or expectation, and in that space, Sylvie felt her potential: for bravery, brilliance, kindness, joy. All of these sails rested on the deck of her ship; they were hers, but she hadn’t seen them before.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“He’s not ambitious. He never knew what to do, so he wanted me to give him instructions for everything, big and small. I’m a fast walker, and he’s slow. I thought I needed a husband, because that’s what we were told as little girls, right? Or maybe not told but shown. It didn’t occur to me that I might be better on my own. I was carrying him,”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“always be one of her great joys that her father had said this to her and that she was able to delight him by paraphrasing one of his favorite poems: “We are not contained between our hats and boots.” And then Mrs. DiPietro had come outside with their bags, and the father and daughter had walked home, their arms touching, molecules dancing between them, and the stars turning on like tiny lightbulbs in the evening sky.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“I’d never seen that kind of love in person. My parents loved each other, but badly, and they were miserable. So were all the other couples in my neighborhood. Have you ever actually seen that kind of love?” William shook his head. He had married out of fear, because he didn’t think he was capable of steering himself into adulthood. He’d needed Julia to be his parent more than his”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“No one in his life, except perhaps Kent, had ever accepted him just as he was, and Sylvie had accepted him when he was so broken he was barely a person.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Sylvie and her sisters had known themselves under their father’s gaze. And with that gaze gone, the threads that had tied their family so tightly together had loosened.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“I have no interest in dating,” Sylvie said. “Dating is about getting dressed up and pretending you’re a pretty girl who thinks about nothing but marriage and babies. I don’t think about those things, and it makes me sad to pretend to be something I’m not. Oh—” She propped herself up on her elbow so she could see her sister in the dim light. “I thought of a metaphor today while I was shelving. Imagine that I’m a house, and when I find my great love, I’ll become the entire world. Our love will show me so much more than I’m able to see on my own.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“You and your sisters have so many reference points, such a dense history," William said. "I never get used to it.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“The fact that he had failed meant he had to continue to walk forward with his life history—his mistakes—slung over his shoulders like a heavy backpack. This fact exhausted him, but he was too tired to reject it.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Charlie had been deemed a failure in his lifetime, but almost thirty years after his death, his daughters' love for him ran so deep that he could be considered the most successful person William had ever known.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“For Alice, part of the strangeness of this new Chicago family was that they conducted a kind of love that seemed voluminous; it required talking over one another and living on top of one another, and it was a force that appeared to include people both present and absent, alive and dead.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Grief is love.” Now Alice thought: Forgiveness is too.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“The onset of grief bore no resemblance to his experience with depression. Depression meant disconnection, shutting down, a dangerous quiet. Now William’s feelings whipped around inside him like a flailing water hose.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“It’s hard to explain, but our love was so deep and wide that it made me love everyone and everything in sight. Which included me.” She smiled wider. “I know it sounds silly, but I’m proud of myself. I guess for living a brave life.” William nodded, unable to speak for a second.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Alice had always found her grandmother’s agitation comforting. It made her feel safe, because she knew if someone was ever mean to her, Grandma Rose would let them have it.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“infrastructure of kindness.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“But perhaps what felt impossible was leaving that person behind. When your love for a person is so profound that it’s part of who you are, then the absence of the person becomes part of your DNA, your bones, and your skin. Charlie’s and”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Everything is so rich inside me now…that it holds my attention. You know the Mark Twain quote about how the only reason for time is so everything doesn’t happen at once? I feel like everything that’s ever happened in my life is happening inside me. I’m never bored anymore. I think about everyone and everything. I’m with you now, and you’re with me in here too.” She pointed at her head. “My dad is here too. He and I are in the back of the grocer’s.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“I miss you, Daddy. I wish you could have seen me as a mother. It would have made you smile.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“shadow represents either the blocking out of light or the other half of a person. When a character loses their shadow, they’ve lost a part of themselves and have to search to get it back.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“She could feel her friends’ love pushing past her skin, into her body, and she cried too.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“The stories and the people in them did sound remarkable, Sylvie thought, when spoken aloud. She and the twins had rarely talked about what happened. They’d lived through it, after all, and the loss of Julia had made them quiet. But Josie’s wonder at the stories, and Izzy’s clear enjoyment of what she saw as a soap opera in which she played a small role, took the sting out of the grief woven through those times. When Sylvie spoke their family history into the air, all she heard was love.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Sylvie leaned against the wall. Because she was clear about what she didn’t want, she was alone. She was no longer who she used to be, and she wasn’t yet whoever she was becoming. She was grateful that her father had prepared her for this type of hard, lonely ground. Because of him, Sylvie knew she could exist outside the boundaries of her past and future selves, for a little while, anyway. Even though it hurt. She understood now, though, why her father had tempered the brutal beauty of this kind of life—this kind of honesty—with alcohol, and why she had always been more comfortable in the library with books than in the world with people.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“He’d always assumed openness was synonymous with danger and that if he wasn’t holding on tight to the new life he’d built, it would blow away. But with the barriers down, he’d discovered that life became bigger.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“She could see this possibility and the way grief and depression tangled inside him; Sylvie found that she could accept his choice even if she didn’t fully understand.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Kent’s affection for William was too clear and too uncomplicated. It shone on William like the sun. No one had ever loved him unconditionally like this, and that love, when he was the most undeserving he’d ever been in his life, made William feel like he was burning up.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“I always thought that I wanted that dream because I was romantic and destined to live a big life, but that wasn’t true. I created that dream because real life scared me, and that dream seemed so far-fetched I didn’t think it would ever happen. I’d never seen that kind of love in person. My parents loved each other, but badly, and they were miserable.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Sylvie had always thought that when, if, she wrote, it would have to be perfect. A beautifully crafted novel, ready to hand to the world. But William had shown her she could write for, and to, herself. And Whitman had rewritten, expanded, cut, and reimagined his poems across his life. He’d created not one beautiful book but different attempts at excellence and beauty as he aged and loved and reconsidered everything.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful