Kim Edwards Quotes

It's good to be in love.

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.

This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.

I've been accused of trying too hard to rescue people

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

He had handed his daughter to Caroline Gill and that act had led him here, years later, to this girl in motion of her own, this girl who had decided yes, a brief moment of release in the back of a car, in the room of a silent house, this girl who had stood up later, adjusting her clothes, with now knowledge of how that moment was already shaping her life.

Either things grow and change or they die.

...and the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood.

But she had felt since childhod that her life would n ot be ordinary. A moment would come- she would know it when she saw it- and everything would change.

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

Norah looked at her son’s tiny face, surprised, as always, by his name. he had not grown into it yet, he still wore it like a wrist band, something that might easily slip off and disappear. She had read about people – where? she could not remember this either – who refused to name their children for several weeks, feeling them to be not yet of the earth, suspended still between two worlds.

Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.

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

My first job was in a nursing home - a terrible place in retrospect. It was in an old house, and the residents were so lonely. People rarely visited them. I only stayed there a couple of months, but it made a strong impression on me.

A fear Paul had transformed all these years, like a gifted alchemist, into anger and rebellion.

He carried Paul inside and up the stairs. He gave him a drink of water and the orange chewable aspirin he like and sat with him on the bed, holding his hand...This was what he yearned to capture on film: these rare moments where the world seemed unified, coherent, everything contained in a single fleeting image. A spareness that held beauty and hope and motion - a kind of silvery poetry, just as the body was poetry in blood and flesh and bone.

Though Lexington is not a small town, it sometimes feels like one, with circles of acquaintance overlapping once, then again; the person you meet by chance at the library or the pool may turn out to be the best friend of your down-the-street neighbor. Maybe thats why people are so friendly here, so willing to be unhurried.

He had never even glimpsed her.

Its impossible to control the reception of your work - the only thing you can control is the experience of writing itself, and the work you create.

Her voice, high and clear, moved through the leaves, through the sunlight. It splashed onto the gravel, the grass. He imagined the notes falling into the air like stones into water, rippling the invisible surface of the world. Waves of sound, waves of light: his father had tried to pin everything down, but the world was fluid and could not be contained.

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

...so young, so lonely and naive, that she imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasn't like that. The love was within her all the time and its only renewal came from giving it away.

Your understanding of a place changes the longer you stay; you discover more, and your own life gets woven into the fabric of the community.

Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement.

The Lake of Dreams grew gradually, over many years, elements and ideas accruing until they gained enough critical mass to become a novel.

He could hardly imagine anymore what his life would be without the weight of his hidden knowledge. He'd 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.

You can't stop time. You can't capture light. You can only turn your face up and let it rain down.

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

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

You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy.

He wished he had some kind of X-ray vision for the human heart.

Short on money, long on hope

It's funny how things seem different, suddenly.

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.

She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.

Writing is always a process of discovery—I never know the end, or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There’s a constant interplay between the imagining and shaping of the story.

...bleak territory of the heart.

She saw herself moving through another life, an exotic, difficult, satisfying life.

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

It wasn't right. He knew that, but it was like falling: once you started you couldn't stop until something stopped you.

A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how.

A moment might be a thousand different things.

So something had begun, and now she could not stop it. Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement. She could leave this place today. She could start a new life somewhere else.

This is what he knew that Paul didn't: the world was precarious and sometimes cruel. He'd had to fight hard to achieve what Paul simply took for granted.

I love to swim, and I love being near water.

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.

His love for her was so deeply woven with resentment that he could not untangle the two.

After Memory Keepers Daughter, it took me a few months to shut out the world. I really had to turn off the Internet and sort of cloister myself away from the world again and sink into that psychic space to write again.