Quotes by Kim Edwards

She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.

You cant stop time. You cant capture light. You can only turn your face up and let it rain down.

Rows and rows of books lined the shelves and I let my eyes linger on the sturdy spines, thinking how human books were, so full of ideas and images, worlds imagined, worlds perceived; full of fingerprints and sudden laughter and the sighs of readers, too. It was humbling to consider all these authors, struggling with this word or that phrase, recording their thoughts for people theyd never meet. In that same way, the detritus of the boxes was humbling - receipts, jotted notes, photos with no inscriptions, all of it once held together by the fabric of lives now finished, gone.

Some dreams matter, illuminate a crucial choice or reveal some intuition thats trying to push its way to the surface. Other, though, are detritus, the residue of the day reassembling itself in some disjointed and chaotic way ... Frantic dreams, they left me tired, and I woke grouchy to another rainy day, the sky so densely gray and the rain so thick that I couldnt that I couldnt see the opposite shore [p, 166]

... the Iroquois take dreams very seriously. They see them as the secret wishes of the soul--the hearts desire, so to speak. Not all dreams, maybe, but the important ones. [p.254]

After all these years, I feel so free. Who knows where I might fly?

Its funny how things seem different, suddenly.

No one could suspect the intricate mysteries of her heart.

The thing is, I used to like that: feeling special because I knew something no one else did. Its a kind of power, isnt it, knowing a secret? But lately I dont like it so much, knowing this. Its not really mine to know, is it?

Once, this whole world had been hidden beneath a shallow sea.

All that sunny afternoon, traveling north and east, Caroline believed absolutely in the future. And why not? For if the worst had already happened to them in the eyes of the world, then surely, surely, it was the worst that they left behind them now.

Away from the bright motion of the party, she carried her sadness like a dark stone clenched in her palm.

She imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasnt like that. The love was within her all the time, and its only renewal came from giving it away.

It seemed there was no end at all to the lies a person could tell, once she got started.

Hed kept this silence because his own secrets were darker, more hidden, and because he believed that his secrets had created hers.

In some deep place in her heart, Caroline had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry had once known her as no one else ever could. But it was not true. He had never even glimpsed her.

Norah watched him, serious and utterly absorbed in his task, overcome by the simple fact of his existence.

Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.

He could hardly imagine anymore what his life would be without the weight of his hidden knowledge. Hed come to think of it as a kind of penance. It was self-destructive, he could see that, but that was the way things were. People smoked, they jumped out of airplanes, they drank too much and got into their cars and drove without seat belts.

Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.