38 Quotes by Matthew Thomas

Sometimes – as it was happening now – the music on the radio matched the rhythm of the bridge. The cables climbed toward the second arch, and she felt herself in the uncanny presence of beauty. Nothing else in her day stirred her to the contemplation of abstract ideas. The bridge was making an argument for its own soundness as she drove over it.

The real world was so messy, the light imperfect, the paint chipped, the happiness only partial.

This was life; you went down with the ship. Who was to say that wasn’t a love story?

Life is going to give you things to be angry at. I don’t want you to be consumed by that anger or forget how much you’re capable of.

Life, she thought, was like that sometimes; for years, things were a certain way, and then in an instant, almost without conscious thought, they weren’t that way any longer, as if all the hidden pressure of their having been the way they’d been had found release through a necessary valve.

When the world seems full of giants who dwarf you, when it feels like a struggle just to keep your head up, I want you to remember there is more to live for than mere achievement. It is worth something to be a good man. It cannot be worth nothing to do the right thing.

Don’t ever love anyone,” her mother said, picking the papers up and sliding them into the bureau drawer she’d kept her ring in. “All you’ll do is break your own heart.

He wanted, one day, to be a person who went out of his way to find out what made other people happy.

She wondered if she’d taken the first step on the road away from her dreams. What scared her was how easy it had been to do it.