Hello Beautiful Quotes

“Sylvie aced the classes she was interested in but got C's or D's in everything else. Julia had operated her determination like a lawn mower and mowed through high school with the next step in her sights.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“William liked it when his fiancée spoke like that; he admired how Julia saw her life as a system of highways to be expertly navigated, and he was grateful to be in her car.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“the only reason for time is so everything doesn’t happen at”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“You’ll all set sail, as you should, and leave your mother and me here. It’s a tale as old as time.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“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,”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“He hated that his friend had to resume the duty of standing guard over his depression.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Julia by her side; it made sense that with her sister she would also briefly be allowed her normal taste buds.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“This act of generosity—Cecelia and Emeline had nothing to gain from him, personally—still struck him as extraordinary.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“I’m not going to waste their kindness.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“whoever she was becoming. She was grateful that her father had prepared her for this type of hard, lonely”
― 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 partner. He was ashamed of this, but it was true.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“According to the poet, death wasn’t final, because life was tangled into it. Sylvie and her sisters walked the earth because of the man they’d buried.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“had talked about forgiveness, and in that moment Alice felt drenched with it. She forgave herself for locking herself away, and she forgave her parents for the bold choices they’d made to protect her. She forgave every mistake she would read about in the manuscript she’d just received. Earlier that afternoon, when Emeline had noticed Alice watching Rose’s dramatic tears, she’d whispered into her niece’s ear, “Grief is love.” Now Alice thought: Forgiveness is too. The mother and daughter held each other in the quiet hallway in a house thundering with life.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Sylvie had experienced two great loves in her life, after all: her sisters first, and then William.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“This realization was a personal blow, and he said, “I’m sorry,” out loud. His premises had been wrong, and he wondered what else he’d been wrong about.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Her sisters had always been her best friends; in Chicago, there had never been a need for anyone else in her life. She and Sylvie and the twins knew every version, every age, every mood of one another;”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“She was stitching her life and heart together, and she wanted to keep it all before her: a beautiful whole.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“William also used to worry about what he did and did not deserve, but no one around him seemed to think in these terms, and it turned out that he no longer did either.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Parents shaped their kids; he knew that better than anyone, and he realized now that he must have shaped Alice by his absence,”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Charlie regularly told his daughters that a job did not make a person.
"What makes you, Daddy?" Emeline had asked a few years earlier in response to this comment. She'd spoken with all of her little-girl sweetness; it was commonly agreed that she was the gentlest and most earnest of the four girls. "Your smile," Charlie had said. "The night sky. The flowering dogwood in front of Mrs. Ceccione's house.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Sylvie thought of her childhood dream and how Julia had complained to Sylvie that the novels she cited as depictions of great love were all tragedies. Sylvie, in her innocence, had insisted that the tragedy part was avoidable. It wasn't woven into the romance. But she had been wrong.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“There was an infrastructure of grudges that had shaped Charlie’s and Rose’s extended families and kept them away from one another.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“she avoided quiet streets after dark and crossed the road if she sensed any aggression or worrisome behavior from a man. She ignored catcalls, kept her head down, turned the nearest corner. In the library, even, she knew when to slump her shoulders, minimize her hips when she walked, and cross her arms over her chest. She, and all women, were prey. But in the company of these men, Sylvie dropped her usual worry over her physical safety. Their proximity meant that strangers would leave her alone.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“The Padavanos talked about Charlie as if he were still part of their lives, still part of themselves, and because of that: He was.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“At their father’s wake, a young paper-factory worker had said, It’s impossible he’s gone. And that man had been right—that had been an impossible loss. Sylvie was an impossible loss too. 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 Sylvie’s deaths were now part of Julia’s topography; the losses ran like a river inside her.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“It was a three-block walk from the ice cream store back to the library, blocks that were so familiar to her that they operated as memories more than sidewalks, streets, and stores.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Hung above the television was the painting Cecelia had recently dropped off. William had told Sylvie about how Cecelia was flustered when she showed it to him. “I always paint portraits,” she’d said. “But I like a challenge. I’m not sure what this is, but technically something about it works.” Sylvie thought the painting was beautiful. If she hadn’t known her sister painted it, she never would have guessed. It was part landscape, part exploration of light, and rain. Sylvie remembered Cecelia telling her sisters that she wanted to paint rain like Van Gogh painted stars. There was pelting water on the canvas, intermixed with faint light. It was the light that drew your eye.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“He reread the contents of the binder at night in bed, because the better prepared he was, the better chance he had of being helpful. William could feel the information swirling around inside him. He believed—even if that belief was couched in worry—that he could provide a service to this team that no one else could. It might be something small, almost unnoticeable, but there was something. He just had to figure out what it was.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“She was aware that she was writing about her childhood in an attempt to make a third door; she needed to take a sledgehammer to a wall to find a way out of the here and now.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“There was a question she needed to ask herself—a question covered with pointy brambles. What do you want?”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful