28 Quotes by Sarah Blake

Undismayed by the ordinary evil of the world, he had the place and the power to make good, to do good. And he did so. He believed one could do right. He had been raised to expect that one could. His was the last generation for whom those givens remained as undisturbed as a silk purse.

And why just then, why that moment was the moment in which she understood quite suddenly her own death, she couldn't say. Simply, she saw how he would miss her.

And Evie was the grown-up now. She was in the line of grown-ups behind the child.

Metaphor, Evie thought as she stepped off the curb as the light changed, was for the young. Or, at any rate, for the younger than she.

If there are places that hold us, keeping us in them, surely too there are people, he felt, people who work like mirrors for the selves we have forgotten.

Wars, plagues, names upon tombs tell us only what happened. But history lies in the cracks in between. In the inexplicable, invisible turns and decisions. A person saying no instead of yes. …It is not that they had lived…but how.

Wars, plagues, names upon tombs tell us only what happened. But history lies in the cracks between.

Like voices humming along a telegraph wire, Evie thought. That was how to teach it. One could rest one's hand upon the past, feel the vibrato, one could close one's eyes, lean low and listen hard. If you were paying attention, one could hear the voices underneath the past. And that was time.

It is the story that lies around the edges of the photographs, or at the end of newspaper account. It's about the lies we tell others to protect them, and about the lies we tell ourselves in order not to acknowledge what we can't bear: that we are alive, for instance, and eating lunch, while bombs are falling, and refugees are crammed into camps, and the news comes toward us every hour of the day. And what, in the end, do we do?