Polly Horvath Quotes

All kinds of ordinary people gave their whole hearts to things you wouldn't think you could give your heart to.

All my life I had wanted to travel but what I discovered that year was that the things that you find out become the places that you go and sometimes you find them out by being jettisoned off alone and other times it is the people who choose to stand by your side who give you the clues. But the important things that happen to you will happen to you even in the smallest places ...

The richness of our lives depends on what we are willing to notice and what we are willing to believe.

And Mrs. Treaclebunny has promised to speak English from now on as well. In fact, she said when she goes to England, that's all she speaks anyway because the animals speak English there. She says anyone who has read children's books with animals in them set in England would know that. Is The Wind in the Willows written in Mole with a little Ratty thrown in? Is Winnie-the-Pooh written in Bear? No, it's English, because that's what the animals there speak. I didn't know that before. Travel is so broadening.

The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.

Some people, well, most people just seem to show up on your life with no clear purpose. Have you noticed that? They're like dust mites. You know they're there, you just don't know what to do about them.

No one really understands a family but the people in it and even they each understand it differently.

Suddenly I realize that everyone in the whole world is, at the end of a day, staring at a dusky horizon, owner of a day that no one else will ever know.

You can be sunk low or as a skunk and still have a joy in your heart. Joy lives like one of those spinning things
a gyroscope in your heart. It doesn't seem to have any connection to circumstance, good or bad.

My mother smoked too but I guessed by now she had quit the habit, which was, I supposed, one of the advantages of being shipwrecked.

When you're a child you never figure a grownup is going to be jealous of you. It's the grownups who seem to have everything. Children give adults far too much credit.

She was alone in the stillness of the universe a little while before all the confusion began. It was if she could hear it ticking, check in on the life at the very center of it, its wellspring that everyone somehow knows, before it was covered by noise.

It's better to be fooled a hundred times than never to look.

Is this what it is to get older, to have adventures you can no longer tell your family because you are moving apart from them? ... Or do you grow up and have adventures you tell no one? Are some adventures only yours alone?

I keep staring at the bag in Mrs. Parks's hand: yellows, greens, blues, whites, pastel colors so soft they look as if they have faded in the sea. The washed colors of the sea and sleep. Pajama colors. The colors of baby clothes. In my nose is the smell of my brothers' heads after they are born. Maybe this is why people making journeys buy saltwater taffy. It gives you the lovely dreamy sense that you can start all over again from the beginning.

It is never a bad thing to take up your fair share of space, said Mr. Bunny ambiguously.

Yesterday I was so full of hope. My life seemed blessed, full of adventures and answered prayers, and now something very, very bad has happened and it will never be the same again. And it all happened because I was greedy. Because I couldn't have an ordinary life. Because I was so taken with the wonders of the world that I could not be content with anything less than the constant awareness of its miracles.

We all belong here equally ... Just by being born onto the earth we are accepted and the earth supports us. We don't have to be especially good. We don't have to accomplish anything. We don't even have to be healthy.

I would never go home again in quite the same way, but that was okay too.

The only really interesting things about someone that makes you want to explore them further is their heart.

I think that it is death alone that makes things poignant.

And, I often think, the truth isn't good or bad, it's just the truth.

We read a lot of books. Children's books mostly, because they're always much more truthful than adult books. And much more entertaining, said Mrs. Bunny.

You know what Sunday is, it's a day with a lot of potential for naps.

Sometimes you get tempted to make something wonderful even better but in doing so you lose what was so wonderful to begin with.

I am not in the body of life. I hover on the extremities. I float.

There's something about sports. You can be setting fire to cats and burying them in your backyard, but as long as you're playing team sports, people think you're okay.

At heart, we're all violent raging wolves, but in our actions we can be pacifists.

I think part of her feared that if Mother could leave her that way, she must be unlovable. And of course, she wasn't.