11 Quotes by Mary Lawson

You'd have thought that after suffering such a loss nothing else would matter to her but that didn't seem to be how it worked. She was fearful about everything now. It was as if she had finally seen the awful power of fate, it's deviousness, the way it could wipe out in an instant the one thing you had been certain you could rely on, and now she was constantly looking over her shoulder, trying to work out where the next blow might fall.

Feeling must have rendered her numb.

Suddenly he saw himself as others in the crowd must surely see him; a silent, solitary figure, standing apart from the rest. He looked out at the hoardes of singing, laughing people and felt more alone than he'd ever felt in his life. Was this how it was going to be then? Was this who he was? A man apart from his fellows, making the journey through life alone?

My Great Grandmother Morrison fixed a book-rest to her spinning wheel so that she could read while she was spinning, or so the story goes. And one Saturday evening she became so absorbed in her book that when she looked up she found that it was half-past midnight and she had spun for half an hour on the Sabbath Day. Back then, that counted as a major sin.

Tomorrow is forever, and years pass in no time at all.

Laurie was just one more dropped stitch in a family tapestry already full of holes.

Good luck. Maybe that’s all it was. Maybe the whole of life depended not on how hard you tried, how determined you were, how sensible, how smart: maybe the whole shooting match depended on luck.

Matt had told me that cold was just the absence of heat, but it didn’t feel like that. It felt like a presence. It felt stealthy, like a thief. You had to wrap your clothes tight around you or it would steal your warmth, and when all your warmth was gone you’d just be a shell, empty and brittle as a dead beetle.

They all lived in their own little clouds.