Rosie Thomas Quotes

Things don't matter, people do

Like so many plain cups on the shelves. You can reach for them, use them without thinking. Most of them don't matter. Sometimes you lose your grip on one of them and it falls and smashes to piece, and you shrug and say to yourself, what a pity. Then you reach for the cup that you use every day, one that you love and use so often that as you stretch out your hand it is already making the shape that fits its curve. You are certain that yesterday it was in its proper place, but now there is nothing. Just air. You have lost something that was so familiar, so much a part of your life that you were not even looking for it. Just expecting it to be there, as always.

Death preserves an ideal.

Some things I can never forget. I must not. Otherwise what do I have left?

She had an English boyfriend who called her more often than she needed to hear from him, a savings account, a mobile phone, an Oyster Card, and a place to live that made her feel as if she was in a movie. She was a London girl.

I need them and they need me to need them

When you're young, everything carries a twin charge of novelty and infinite possibility

The future offers everything. Reach out and take whatever you want.

The harsh world unjustly reserved its most severe punishments for women.

Learning is important. It is a way to make a life better for yourself and your family.

The dead were just the dead, neither awful nor remarkable. History separated out these individuals and preserved their names where others were obilterated for ever.

It's the fragment of your past that explains why you have lived your life the way you have done and made the mistakes that you have made

I am afraid of losing what I have already valued.

patient compromises? 'I was afraid. I was

Let her be with her memories. Better that than be aware of this reality.

Anything that makes it easier to understand, makes it a little easier to bear.

How age enamels us, she would say. It builds up in layers and locks us inside our own skin, stopping us from breaking out, preventing the outside from burrowing in.

Mair sat down on the bed. The ancient pink electric blanket was still stretched from corner to corner, and she thought of the weeks of her father's last illness when she had come home to the valley to nurse him, as best she could, and to keep him company. They had enjoyed long, rambling conversations about the past and the people her father had once known.

Wherever you look there is so much loss and folly to contemplate.

I've grieved enough for his life cut short and for mine for running on for so long with so little in it. It's weakness now, but I suppose I am crying out of a general sense of loss. Maybe I am mourning for the human condition.

Love. The wide sea that one word conjures up, all the currents and tides and storms and oily swells of it.

Death, when it's right there it doesn't seem too huge and terrible to let into your mind.

Got to go on, haven't we? Life goes on.

Is nothing in life ever straight and clear, the way children see it?