120 Quotes by Karen Thompson Walker

The unproven, he says, should not be confused with the impossible.

She looked lonely through the lens of my telescope, like one of those faraway stars, still visible to our eyes but no longer really there.

I tend to mostly take the day off from working on Sundays, but I do spend some time reading. Mostly what I’m picking up is what’s in stores. I really do love to read fiction from the last year or two.

I was a book editor for nine years. I’m familiar with the opposite experience, bracing myself for the likelihood that no one would want to publish my book.

I kept quiet, but the knowledge gathered like a storm. I could see the future: My father wasn’t coming back. And this one fact seemed to point to other facts and others still: Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end.

No one is using the word quarantine, but Mei looks it up. From the Italian, quaranta giorni, forty days. Forty days: the period that ships were once required to wait before entering the port of Venice – time enough, they hoped, for a contagious disease to burn itself out.

The only thing you have to do in this life is die,” said Mrs. Pinsky... “everything else is a choice.

Shortly after the 2004 Indonesian earthquake, I read that the earthquake had affected the rotation of the earth, shortening the length of our 24-hour day. Even though the change was extremely slight – only a few microseconds – I found the idea incredibly haunting.

There’s a pleasure in being reminded of the value of ordinary life.