27 Quotes by John Burnham Schwartz

that a child is not an event, alleged or otherwise, a mistake or accident or crime. . . he is by definition more than this, sum rather than division, a living promissory note.

Along the wide curving moat surrounding the palace, rows of cherry trees announced the end of their seasonal beauty. Some of the trees were weeping: blossoms in white and palest pink, ponderous with decreptitude, eddying on the brown water, stirred by the paddling of ducks.

Men had suddenly become a scarce commodity, if not quite as sought after as rice.

There's no backward and no forward, no day other than this. You fill your cart as you go, and that's that.

A girl never can predict who might wander into her boudoir during a bubble bath.

Because it was the endless wanting that would break you, I thought. The constant craving for a love that might never be fulfilled that would bring you low, bit by bit, until one day you'd no longer be able to recognize any part of yourself.

By almost every account he's a fine young man. I'm simply trying to figure out why I should care that he's three centimeters taller than he was in May.

I've discovered something interesting," she said. "If you ever want to avoid somebody, this city's as small as a postage stamp. But if you ever really want to run into somebody, if you really hope and pray, it's as big as an ocean.

The burden of being intelligent and shy and young is that you will always know, cannot not know; have grown up in a fiction of perpetual responsibility, believing that whatever cracks in life you find must be your cracks, that anything at all can be your fault.