Quote collection
26 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other; and a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had been doing so for a long time."
"I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. the only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It's like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it's there and keep falling in. After a while, it's still there, but you learn to walk round it."
"People were buying milk, or filling their cars with petrol, or even posting letters. And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The superhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that."
"Beginnings could happen more than once or in different ways. You could think you were starting something afresh, when actually what you were doing was carrying on as before. He had faced his shortcomings and overcome them and so the real business of walking was happening only now."
"You got up, and you did something. And if trying to find a way when you don't even know you can get there isn't a small miracle; then I don't know what is."
"He understood that in walking to atone for the mistakes he had made, it was his journey to accept the strangeness of others. As a passerby, he was in a place where everything, not only the land, was open. People would feel free to talk, and he was free to listen. To carry a little of them as he went."
"I've begun to think that we sit far more than we're supposed to...Why else would we have feet?"
"But maybe it's what the world needs. A little less sense, and a little more faith."
"If we can't accept what we don't know, there really is no hope."
"He understood that in walking to atone for the mistakes he had made, it was also his journey to accept the strangeness of others."
"But it never ceases to amaze me how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are."
"If I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, it stands to reason that I'm going to get there. I've begun to think we sit far more than we're supposed to." He smiled. "Why else would we have feet?"
"There was no escaping what he had realized as he fought for warmth in the night. With or without him,the moon and the wind would go on, rising and falling. The land would keep stretching ahead until it hit the sea. People would keep dying. It made no difference if Harold walked, or trembled, or stayed at home."
"And it can take a lifetime, a life of many years, to accept the incongruity of things: that a small moment can sit side by side with a big one, and become part of the same."
"There is so much to the human mind we don't understand. But, you see, if you have faith, you can do anything."
"After the two drinks, she felt warm inside, and slightly indistinct at the edges."
"It was not a life, if lived without love."
"... He went under the stars, and the tender light of the moon, when it hung like an eyelash and the tree trunks shone like bones. He walked through wind and weather, and beneath sun-bleached skies. It seemed to Harold that he had been waiting all his life to walk. He no longer knew how far he had come, but only that he was going forward. The pale Cotswold stone became the red brick of Warwickshire, and the land flattened into middle England. Harold reached his hand to his mouth to brush away a fly, and felt a beard growing in thick tufts. Queenie would live. He knew it."
"If we don't go mad once in a while, there's no hope."
"...People would make the decisions they wished to make and some of them would hurt both themselves and those who loved them, and some would pass unnoticed, while others would bring joy."