27 Quotes by Martine Leavitt

You, my lord, are the ending of all true stories.

Now I will tell you a true thing, child, and if you are wise you will remember it. The soul, it longs for its mate as much as the body. Sad it is that the body be greedier than the soul. But if you would be happy all your days, as I was with your grandfather, subdue the body and marry the soul.

She learned that there is a cruelty in the world. She did not yet understand that those who hurt others do so because they believe that people desire to hurt them. She did not know yet that such people suffer more than the ones they hurt, for they must live in their own skin, in a world of their own making, a world full of enemies.

Living to an extraordinary age, she mourned them all equally as she buried her husband and, one by one, her children. In this suffering she found the best sort of perfection – the kind that never demands it of others.

And so he did his endless work,′ I continued quietly, ’without feeling, without pity, without rest, for to open his heart to these would be to open his heart to his loneliness and longing and that was beyond bearing.

There is no hell, John Temsland. Each man, when he dies, sees the landscape of his own soul.

These are the best reasons to do anything in life. People who say things like this are the kind of people who change the world. Who prevent the world from ending. Or at least they can change the inner world of a reader and that is a sacred power.

Susie: Maybe we’re all making everything up as we go.

Demonstrate talent, said Grandmother often to me, and you will still be loved by a husband when beauty has faded.