Jamie Ford Quotes

What his son, Marty, never fully understood was that deep down there was an Ethel-shaped hole in Henry's life, and without her, all he felt was the draft of loneliness, cold and sharp, the years slipping away like blood from a wound that never heals.

As you play this record, I hope you'll think of the good, not the bad. Of what was, not what wasn't meant to be. Of the time we spent together, not the time we've spent apart. Most of all I hop you'll think of me...

Somehow life had become a story problem, and William was horrible at math.

If there was anything she had learned from her mother, it was the painful understanding that cages come in all sizes - some even have white picket fences, four walls, and a front door.

Good Morning, Henry. How's it feel to be a prisoner for a day?' Henry looked at Keiko. 'Best day of my life.' Keiko found her smile all over again.

The library is like a candy store where everything is free.

Hope can get you through anything.

We don't get to choose our parents," Sunny said. "If we did, some of us might choose never to be born at all.

I think I get it now. It doesn't matter how nice home is
it just matters that it feels like home.

Marty stayed busy as a chemistry major at Seattle University,

Henry, this isn't about us. I mean it is, but they don't define you by the button you wear. They define you by what you do, by what your actions say about you. And coming here, despite your parents, says a lot to them- and me. And they're Americans first. They don't see you as the enemy. They see you as a person.

You can't expect children to sew their own gaping wounds without leaving a terrible scar.

So Henry found himself stepping off the bus three stops early and wandering over to the Panama Hotel, a place between worlds when he was a child, a place between times now that he was a grown man.

From character Henry Lee in the Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, " He'd learned long ago: perfection isn't what families are all about". Love it!

She could smell her mother's skin, her lotion, her perfume
her essence. She missed her so much. She clawed at her pillow, wanting to cry, but tears never came, just a swirling riptide of feeling
anger, abandonment, the fear of being alone, and the weight of the emotional millstone still tied around her neck, submerging her further into the murky depths of stinging, biting solitude. She wished she could wail all night. Instead she curled up in the darkness of her bedroom, listening to her racing heartbeat, which eventually slowed, like the ticking of a clock unwound.

Henry looked up and down the empty avenue - no cars or trucks anywhere. No bicycles. No paperboys. No fruit sellers or fish buyers. No flower carts or noodle stands. The streets were vacant, empty - the way he felt inside. There was no one left.

Feelings can only be hidden so long from those who really pay attention.
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There are people in our lives whom we love, and lose, and unfailingly long for. They orbit our hearts like Halley's Comet, crossing into our universe only once, or if we are lucky, twice in a lifetime.

A young nurse, someone new whom he didn't recognise, came up to Henry and patted him on the arm. "Are you a friend or a family member?" She whispered the question in his ear, trying not to disturb Sheldon.
The question hung there like a beautiful chord, ringing in the air. Henry was Chinese, Sheldon obviously wasn't. They looked nothing alike. Nothing at all. "I'm distant family," Henry said.

As an author, I get paid to break my own heart on a regular basis.

Reality stripped of the armor of optimism was nothing but naked truth - pale and weak.

At least we have the record, Henry thought. A reminder of a place where people didn't seem to care what you looked like, where you were born, or where your family was from. When the music played, it didn't seem to make one lick of difference if your last was Abernathy or Anjoy, Kung or Kobayashi.

The more Henry though about the shabby old knickknacks, the forgotten treasures, the more he wondered if his own broken heart might be found in there, hidden among the unclaimed possessions of another time. Boarded up in the basement of a condemned hotel. Lost, but never forgotten.

Moths flitted in the porch light, pinging against the bulb, helplessly drawn to something they could never have.

Seeing isn't believing, feeling is believing." She reached out and patted his coat, finding the space above his heart, where the handbill was safely tucked away. "I feel you.

The mechanics of dying ...

I try not to live in the past ... but ... sometimes the past lives in me

Like so many things Henry had wanted in life
like his father, his marriage, his life
it had arrived a little damaged. Imperfect. But he didn't care, this was all he'd wanted. Something to hope for, and he'd found it. It didn't matter what condition it was in.