Kim Edwards Quotes

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

You can't spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won't work. You'll just end up missing the life you have.

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.

...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.

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.

Lately, the world felt fragile, like a blown egg, as if it might shatter beneath a careless touch.

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

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

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

A moment might be a thousand different things.

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.

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.

Music is like you touch the pulse of the world. Music is always happening, and sometimes you get to touch it for a while, and when you do you know that everything's connetcted to everything else.

It's good to be in love.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

...bleak territory of the heart.

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

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.

He fished in his pocket for his keys and instead pulled out the last geode, gray and smooth, earth-shaped. He held it, warming in his palm, thinking of all mysteries the world contained: layers of stone, concealed beneath the flesh of earth and grass; these dull rocks, with their glimmering hidden hearts.

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.

They turned a distracted gaze on the world, wide-eyed, somehow, and questioning.

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.

No one could suspect the intricate mysteries of her heart.

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

Short on money, long on hope

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.

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.

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.

That there were other worlds, invisible, unknown, beyond imagination even, was a revelation to him.

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

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

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.

Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement.

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.

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.

There was something not quite right about her eagerness, an eerie kind of voyeurism in her need for bad news.

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.

The place was a familiar as breath but as far from his life now as the moon.

He had never even glimpsed her.

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

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

Grief, it seemed, was a physical place.