30 Quotes by Jessica Shattuck

Instead she squeezes Mary’s arm and appreciates her kindness. Her understanding. This is why people have children, even when they believe the world is going to hell, even when life is nothing but uncertainty. In hopes of being understood.

She was her own kind of dreamer, a blind mathematician skating along the thin surface of life, believing in the saving power of logic, reason, and information, overlooking the whole murky expanse of feeling and animal instinct that was the real driver of human behavior, the real author of history.

They had watched him make a masterwork of scapegoating Jews for Germany’s fall from power and persuade his followers that enlightenment, humanity, and tolerance were weaknesses – “Jewish” ideas that led to defeat.

Martin was swept up in the sound – no longer blood and bone, frozen feet and hungry belly, but an empty vessel filling with notes, carried by something older and bigger and more permanent than himself.

The child exasperated Marianne with her endless obsession with possession. She seemed to have absorbed the national sense of aggrievement, as if she, personally, were the victim of some great unfairness.

Americans can face the world with open arms, Marianne had once said, because the world hasn’t yet come to knock it down.

This music had been played and heard before and would be again, not only here in this church, but in places all over the world, by people living in different circumstances and different times.

There is not enough air in the room for Marianne and Elizabeth to share. They have learned this the hard way, but acceptance of the fact has made life easier. Now they see each other twice a year, for a weekend in the early summer and for the American holiday of Thanksgiving.

There is so much gray between the black and the white and this is where most of us live, trying, but so often failing, to bend towards the light.