Hello Beautiful Quotes

“they were all there, buried within her.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Julia wondered if all four girls’ voices lived inside their mother.”
― 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 nad been wrong.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“She knew it was a strange contradiction, but despite her interest in love, weddings made her uncomfortable. They were too showy, too public. Deep love between two people was a private, wordless endeavor,”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“and nannies”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“She wasn’t nearly as old as she looked, but starting years earlier Rose had forbidden any celebration of her birthday, a personal declaration of war against the passage of time.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“The dream was now in the air, at risk of the elements, beyond her grasp.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Everything is so rich inside me now…that it holds my attention. You know the 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

“you can’t fail when you’re doing what you love.”
― 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. And 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.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“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.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“They looked like what they were: a basketball team that had waded into a lake.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“nothing in her life seemed real unless her sister shared”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Sylvie sighed. By the complicated math that tied the sisters together, Emeline was correct. There were four of them, but inside the four there were two pairs: Sylvie and Julia, and Emeline and Cecelia.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“She wanted to explain to Charlie how she now saw the world, because he was the one who would understand. Her father had seen her power—understood its scope—before she had.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“With her daughter, Julia was complete. She realized, amazed: I love myself. That had somehow never been true before.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“She realized that she was most certainly a mammal and had the ability to shake the world apart and create a human when she unleashed her power. She was a mother. This identity shuddered through her, welcome like water to a dry riverbed. It felt so elemental and true that Julia must have unknowingly been a mother all along, simply waiting to be joined by her child. Julia had never felt like this before. Her brain was a gleaming engine, and her resources felt immense. She was clarity.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Because everything moved so quickly and William hadn’t yet arrived, Cecelia was in the delivery room, just as Julia had been with her. The ability to hear and understand words was the first of Julia’s capacities to go. Soon she was thinking in sentences without prepositions or adjectives. No, no more, stop, baby coming. It felt like a wall had fallen inside her and revealed that she was no more than an animal. This was a surprise to Julia, even from that place. She growled and mooed and caterwauled as her body somehow squeezed itself. The noises seemed to come from inside her and outside her, and she felt no shame. She felt power. She felt like a lioness, covered in sweat, rising up on the hard bed they’d laid her on, announcing, “Push,” as everything she was made of, in lockstep, guided the baby out of her body. “It’s”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“We’re part of the sky, and the rocks in your mother’s garden, and that old man who sleeps by the train station. We’re all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Many guests wept, on and off, as if their tears were for Charlie but also for their own personal heartbreaks. An early lost love, a miscarriage, the pounding headache of never having enough money. In a setting where weeping was acceptable, they would take their opportunity.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“All of that was blurred, though, by Julia’s luminescence. Her white dress was covered with tiny white beads that swished when she walked. Her hourglass figure was hugged by the fabric; her hair was pinned up on top of her head; her eyes were bright. She looked like she had been plugged in to a power source the rest of them didn’t have access to.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“She counted how many steps she had to travel away from the door before she could no longer smell roses: thirteen.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Sylvie had read somewhere that the more times a story was told, the less accurate it became. Humans were prone to exaggeration; they leaned away from the parts of the narrative they found boring and leaned into the exciting spots.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“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

“It’s because you know that more is possible that you’ll always see the pointlessness in following a stupid rule or clocking in and out of a boring class. Most people can’t see that distinction, so they just do as they’re told.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“She was a mother. This identity shuddered through her, welcome like water to a dry riverbed. It felt so elemental and true that Julia must have unknowingly been a mother all along, simply waiting to be joined by her child.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“He was his acts of kindness, and his love for his daughters, and the twenty minutes he’d spent with Sylvie behind the grocer’s that evening.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“I presume her greatness.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“anyone that dresses and does their hair as carefully as your mom does every single day is unhappy on the inside. She’s trying to hide all her messiness, and I want better than that for you.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Sylvie had read somewhere that the more times a story was told, the less accurate it became. Humans were prone to exaggeration; they leaned away from the parts of the narrative they found boring and leaned into the exciting spots. Details and timelines changed over years of repetition. The story became more myth and less true.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful