Kim Edwards Quotes

You couldn't blame him, no, you couldn't fault him for wanting to go deeper into every fleeting moment, to study its mystery.

We all have secrets. We've all kept secrets. We've had secrets kept from us, and we know how that feels.

I wondered if I could call my experience in the chapel prayer
not a long list of asking, after all, or a rote string of words, but rather a kind of sacred listening. [p, 355]

It's funny how things seem different, suddenly.

I lived for two years in Odawara, a castle town an hour outside of Tokyo, near the sea. It's a beautiful place, and I drew on my experiences there when writing 'The Lake of Dreams.'

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.

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

The city of Pittsburgh gleaming suddenly before her ... so startling in its vastness and its beauty that she had gasped and slowed, afraid of losing control of the car

I think that it would be hard to find a family that didn't have a secret in it somewhere, and sometimes we know about them, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we have an inkling that there's something hidden, but I think that it touches everybody's life.

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

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.

Why did she [Madame Curie] seek to tame this mystery, which in the hands of others turned a multitude to ashes? Her work exploded with the violence of a thousand suns, but I must tell her that it was not her fault, the way they twisted her creation, tampered with her dreams.
"I will tell her.
"They said she was inhuman, heartless, but it is not so. She is here now. Weeping, she awaits me, She is carrying balm for our hands. [p, 56]

What would happen, they conjectured, if they simply went on assuming their children would do everything. Perhaps not quickly. Perhaps not by the book. But what if they simply erased those growth and development charts, with their precise, constricting points and curves? What if they kept their expectations but erased the time line? What harm could it do? Why not try?

Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement.

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

She had read about people-where? she could not remember this either- who refused to name their children for several weeks, feeling them to not be yet of the earth, suspeded still between two worlds.

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

In writing, I want to be remembered for telling good stories in beautiful and powerful language, using the poetry of words to reflect the thematic concerns of compelling stories.

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.

He had never even glimpsed her.

I haven't done any genealogical exploring myself, though members of my family and also of my husband's family have traced things back. I have a great grandfather on my mother's side who was a musician, and I'd like to know more about his life.

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.

I grew up in Skaneateles, a small town in New York's Finger Lakes region, where parts of my family have lived for five generations. I can walk the streets there and point out my father's childhood home, the houses my grandfather built, the farm where my great-great-uncle worked after he emigrated from England in the 1880s.

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 that's why people are so friendly here, so willing to be unhurried.

Though my stories aren't autobiographical, I do sometimes use things from my life.

It's good to be in love.

I think that the whole child welfare system has to be totally taken apart and built up again. Have an agency just specifically for those follow-up cases.

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.

For the rest of his life, he realized, he would be torn like this, aware of Phoebe's awkwardness, the difficulties she encountered in the world simply by being different, and ye propelled beyond all this by her direct and guileless love. By her love, yes, and, he realized ... by his own new and strangely uncomplicated love for her.

William Trevor is an author I admire; his stories are subtle and powerful, and beautifully written.

Sometimes loneliness is an emergency situation

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

Caroline said easily, amazed all over again at this sudden facility she'd developed, the fluidity and ease of her lies.

I had a great life even before 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' took off. I really enjoy teaching.

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

You hold me at arm's length.

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.

The challenges in this place are real and sometimes very difficult, but I've learned to slow down and look for beauty in my days, for the mysteries and blessings woven into everything, into the very words we speak.

A moment might be a thousand different things.

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

The love was within her all the time and its only renewal came from giving it away"

The Memory Keeper's Daughter

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 they'd 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.

I swam across Skaneateles Lake, about a mile, when I was 11 years old. I remember feeling when I was in the middle of the lake that I would be there forever, and having no idea where on shore I'd end up. I made it, and I'm proud of the determination and persistence that took.

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

There was so much force and beauty in the windows, such unsettled sadness in what little I knew of Rose's life, all her longing, her distance from her daughter. Just knowing she had existed opened new and uneasy possibilities within my understanding of the story I'd always thought I'd known by heart ... Whoever Rose had been, she was gone, unable to speak for herself, fading into the past as surely as these rainy colors were diffusing, even now [p. 142].

I find my husband's family history fascinating, as they can trace the family lineage back to ancestors who fought, and died, in the first battle of the Revolution, as well as to many other interesting people.

All day she had been dreaming of the comet, its wild and fiery beauty, what it might mean, how her life might change.

I have found that if you love your life ..
Life will love you back .!

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

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

I just couldn't do it- break all the rules. Blow everything up."
"The world doesn't end," Bree said quietly. "Amazing, but it really doesn't.

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

He liked that bones were solid things, surviving even the white heat of cremation. Bones would last; it was easy for him to put his faith in something so solid and predictable.

A vase full of flowers: dark red and pale pink in a cloud of baby's breath.

I hate that more than anything - being part of a cliché.

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?

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.

I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.

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.

The world beyond the water was a blue of green and stone and blue. A moment later Yoshi pushed through, the water pouring down in sheets so smooth it looked like glass, and stepped into the calm [p. 296]

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

dirt, but the machine began to make

For this is what I have learned, in my short life: do not act out of anger. Act from love or not at all. I have seen it, how anger makes a space for what I must call evil.

Some dreams matter, illuminate a crucial choice or reveal some intuition that's 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 couldn't that I couldn't see the opposite shore [p, 166]

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.

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

...her tone more disapproving than dismayed.

Lexington is home to the University of Kentucky, where my husband and I teach, as well as to Transylvania University, the oldest college established west of the Allegheny Mountains, and several multinational companies; people come and go from all over the world.

On an impulse he went into the room and stood before the window, pushing aside the sheer curtain to watch the snow, now nearly eight inches high on the lampposts and the fences and the roofs. It was the sort of storm that rarely happened in Lexington, and the steady white flakes, the silence, filled him with a sense of excitement and peace. It was a moment when all the disparate shards of his life seemed to knit themselves together, every past sadness and disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty hidden now beneath the soft white layers. Tomorrow would be quiet, the world subdued and fragile, until the neighborhood children came out to break the stillness with their tracks and shouts and joy. He remembered such days from his own childhood in the mountains, rare moments of escape when he went into the woods, his breathing amplified and his voice somehow muffled by the heavy snow that bent branches low, drifted over paths. The world, for a few short hours, transformed.

The year was 1922, and the Curies had transformed plain earth into something rare and unimagined. A secret of the universe has been revealed, and a restless world dreamed of transformation. [p. 205]

One of my greatest times of inspiration is when I'm traveling or living in a new country - there's a tremendous freedom that comes from being unfettered by your own, familiar culture, and by seeing the world from a different point of view.

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.

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

It shocked me, the strength of the image, the desire I had to see if it might happen this way- though I couldn't tell if it was really desire in the present or leftover from the past.

I like to think I've grown as a writer and taken some risks, but I still consider myself to be a literary writer.

I've always set my stories in places I know well. It frees me up to spend more imaginative time on the characters if I'm not worrying about the logistics.

Around me the beautiful windows, connecting me to other lives and other times, to things done and also deliberately left undone, stood dark. Rose, I was sure, had acted out of love, yet for Iris her mother's absence had remained an unresolved sadness at the center of her life. I thought of what Rose had written about anger, about its power to corrupt, to make a space for evil. Maybe she was right. Maybe evil, that old-fashioned word, could be called other things, disharmony or dysfunction. Maybe Rose was right and evil wasn't attached top an individual as much as if was a force in the world, a seeing force, one that worked like a self-replicating virus, seeking to entangle, to ensnare, to undo beauty. [p.353]

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

It's kind of a mysterious process, but something will catch my attention, and I'll make a note about it. I may even write a few pages about it, and then I'll put it aside, but I'll sort of keep it in mind. Then as time goes on, other things will gather to it as if it's a magnet, almost, and eventually, there's enough to make the story.

His discomfort seemed to soften her, for when he met her eyes again, they were kind.

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

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.