8 Quotes by Ashley Hay

---Sleeps through the washes of the morning's colors and the warm brilliance of sunrise. She sleeps in a world where she remembers, perfectly, every detail about her husband, this day, that sentence, another touch. She will remember it all in the deepest sleep, and lose it again the moment her eyes open and she wonders how late it must be for the sun to already be so high and then remembers, in the next instant, what happened the day before.

How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line—how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined—well, a good poem.

Such fascinating things, libraries. She closes her eyes. She couldwalk inside and step into a murder, a love story, a complete accountof somebody else’s life, or mutiny on the high seas. Such potential;such adventure—there’s a shimmer of malfeasance in trying otherways of being.

That is marriage, he thought, remaking yourself in someone else’s image. And who knew where the truth of it began or would end?

The oceans and the skies…and the sun coming up each new day. That’s all there is, I think. That’s all that matters to think on.

There’s some comfort in seeing things go on; birds keep singing, buses keep running. But if you want those things to continue, perhaps you have to accept that the other kinds of things, unhappier, even horrific ones, will continue too. And that’s harder.

They’d had a long chat, Elsie Gormley and this house, more than sixty years of it. It had witnessed all her tempers, all her moods, and usually improved them. It held her voice, her husband’s, her children’s, and now their children’s in turn – echoes and repetitions lodged in around the baseboards, around the window frames like those pale motes of dust that had wedged at the edge of the kitchen floor.

All the things they’d brought into this house; all of Elsie’s things, packed up and taken away. A world delineated by this ebb and flow of items. The stuff of people’s lives.