29 Quotes by Maggie Shipstead

A piece of advice for you....Knowing what you don't want is just as useful as knowing what you do. Maybe more.[Adelaide Scott, to Hadley Baxter]

Abandonment stings, even when it means freedom.[Hadley Baxter]

Art is distortion but a form of distortion that has the possibility of offering clarification, like a corrective lens.[Adelaide Scott]

I'm told girls dream of being wives, but wifedom seems an awful lot like defeat dressed up as victory. We're celebrated for marrying, but after that we must cede all territory and answer to a new authority like a vanquished nation.[Marian Graves]

When you are truly afraid, you experience an urgent desire to split from your body. You want to remove yourself from the thing that will experience pain and horror, and you are that thing. You are aboard a sinking ship, and you are the ship itself. But, flying, fear can't be permitted. To inhabit yourself fully is your only hope and, beyond that, to make the airplane a part of yourself, also.[Marian Graves]

People spent their lives searching for something beyond the simple friction of skin on skin, but there was nothing. The void between two people could never be closed, and in trying to close it, they would only learn everything that was to be despised in the other.

The flowers, the candles, the easy swing of the music, his daughter's perfectly made-up face, her artfully arranged hair, the swell of her pregnancy - it all cried out for love, for pride, for fatherly tenderness, even if Daphne would not look at him, even if she had walled herself up with her happiness and left him outside. He did not know how to make her forgive him. He would have to wait.

...I thought about how the medium of music is time, how if time stopped, a painting would exist unchanged but music would vanish, like a wave without an ocean.[Hadley Baxter]

An airplane crossed the sky, and she imagined its interior-people packed in rows like eggs in a carton, the chemical smell of the toilets, pretzels in foil pouches, cans hiss-popping open, black oval of night sky embedded in the rattling walls. How strange that something so drab, so confined, so stifling with sour exhalations and the fumes of indifferent machinery might be mistaken for a star.