Quotes from book

The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“It seemed there was no end at all to the lies a person could tell, once she got started.”

“Lately, the world felt fragile, like a blown egg, as if it might shatter beneath a careless touch.”

“… so young, so lonely and naive, that she imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasn't like that. The love was within her all the time and its only renewal came from giving it away.”

“You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy.”

“… and the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood.”

“Music is like you touch the pulse of the world. Music is always happening, and sometimes you get to touch it for a while, and when you do you know that everything's connetcted to everything else.”

“Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.”

“In some deep place in her heart, Caroline had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry had once known her as no one else ever could. But it was not true. He had never even glimpsed her.”

“Either things grow and change or they die.”

“You can't spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won't work. You'll just end up missing the life you have.”

“After all these years, I feel so free. Who knows where I might fly?”

“She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.”

“No one could suspect the intricate mysteries of her heart.”

“It's good to be in love.”

“A moment might be a thousand different things.”

“His love for her was so deeply woven with resentment that he could not untangle the two.”

“This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.”

“He'd kept this silence because his own secrets were darker, more hidden, and because he believed that his secrets had created hers.”