Sarah Blake > Quotes

“every story - love or war - is a story about looking left when we should have been looking right.”
― Sarah Blake, The Postmistress

“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?”
― Sarah Blake, The Postmistress

“Sand was dribbling out of the bag of her attention, faster and faster.”
― Sarah Blake

“It began, as it often does, with a woman putting her ducks in a row.”
― Sarah Blake, The Postmistress

“It gets you thinking about all the parts in a story we never see" --he cleared his throat-- "the parts around the edges. You bring someone like that boy so alive before us and there he is set loose in our world so that we can't stop thinking of him. But then the report is over, the boy disappears. He was just a boy in a story and we never know the ending, we never get to close the book. It makes you wonder what happens to the people in them after the story stops--all the stories you've reported for instance. Where are they all now?”
― Sarah Blake, The Postmistress

“Wars, plagues, names upon tombs tell us only what happened. But history lies in the cracks between.”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

“We can't change what is coming. Something is always coming.”
― Sarah Blake, The Postmistress

“She imagined she could pull Time like taffy, stretching it longer and longer between her hands until the finest point had been reached, the point just before breaking, and she could live there. A point at the center of time with no going forward, no going back. Clasped in this way, without speaking, walking into no discernible ending, she could almost believe they tread on time.”
― Sarah Blake, The Postmistress

“Because people are people. Evie fixed her eyes on him. People have complicated lives. Lives that don't necessarily fall so cleanly into black-and-white choices - people are blind, but still well-intended, and see as far as they can.”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

“Long ago, I believed that, given a choice, peple would turn to good as they would turn to light. I believed that reporting-honest, unflinching pictutes of the truth-could be a becon to lead us to deamand that worongs be righted, injustices puniches, and the weak and inncoent cared for. I must have believed, when I started out, that the shoulder of public opinion could be put up against the door of public indifference and would, when given the proper direction, shove it wide with the power of wanting to stand on the side of angel. (Frances Bard)”
― Sarah Blake , The Postmistress

“Some stories don't get told. Some stories you hold on to. To stand and watch and hold it in your arms was not cowardice. To look straight at the beast and feel its breath on your flanks and not to turn--one could carry the world that way.

They sat together, the four of them, a little longer, before Harry rose slowly to his feet. It was Thursday. It was the end of the afternoon. It was time to pick up and carry on to the other side of the day.”
― Sarah Blake, The Postmistress

“As a girl, it had been firmly set down that one ought never speak until one was spoken to, and when one did, one ought not speak of anything that might provoke or worry. One referred to the limb of the table, not the leg, the white meat on the chicken, not the breast. Good manners were the foundations of civilization. One knew precisely with whom one sat in a room based entirely on how well they behaved, and in what manner. Forks and knives were placed at the ten-twenty on one's plate when one was finished eating, One ought to walk straight and keep one's hands to oneself when one s poke, least one be taken for an Italian or Jew. A woman was meant to tend a child, a garden, or a conversation. A woman ought to know how to mind the temperature in a room, adding a little heat in a well-timed question, or cool a warm temper with the suggestion of another drink, a bowl of nuts, and a smile.

What Kitty had learned at Miss Porter's School---handed down from Sarah Porter through the spinsters teaching there, themselves the sisters of Yale men who handed down the great words, Truth. Verity. Honor--was that your brothers and your husbands and your sons will lead, and you will tend., You will watch and suggest, guide and protect. You will carry the torch forward, and all to the good.

There was the world. And one fixed an eye keenly on it. One learned its history; one understood the causes of its wars. One debated and, gradually, a picture emerged of mankind over the centuries; on understood the difference between what was good and what was right. On understood that men could be led to evil, against the judgment of their better selves. Debauchery. Poverty of spirit. This was the explanation for so many unfortunate ills--slavery, for instance. The was the reason. Men, individual men, were not at fault. They had to be taught. Led. Shown by example what was best. Unfairness, unkindness could be addressed. Queitly. Patiently.. Without a lot of noisy attention.

Noise was for the poorly bred.

If one worried, if one were afraid, if one doubted--one kept it to oneself. One looked for the good, and one found it. The woman found it, the woman pointed it out, and the man tucked it in his pocket, heartened. These were the rules.”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

“A woman will be loved...in proportion as she makes those around her happy...”
― Sarah Blake, Grange House

“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.”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

“A life can change in a single moment, and from there you simply move forward.”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

“She was an historian; the past was her butter and bread. But, she thought as she made her way tot he bathroom and turned on the taps, nothing had readied her for the gentle persistent feeling growing stronger through this month, a steady rain in the back of her mind, that there was something she was missing, that she had failed somehow, that there had been a turn, back there in the road of her life, a trailhead, an opening she'd barrelled right past. Somewhere back there had been the right route, the way through, and she had missed it.”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

“There was no good name for this spot. Evie, who had shot like an arrow from school into life, who had never wavered, who had seen clear right from the start where she wanted to get to, had lately found herself more and more in the brambles. Somehow, here she was, no longer certain where she was going. Or even if she wanted to get there.

The jobs had been won, the beds made, the dishes washed, the children sprouted. The wheel had stopped, and now what? Where, for instance, was the story of a middle-aged orphan with the gray streak in her hair, the historian who had rustled thirteenth-century women's lives out of fugitive pages, who believed more than most that there was no such thing as the certainty of a plot in the story of a life, in fact who taught this to students year in and year our, and yet who found herself lately longing, above all else for just that? Longing, against reason, for some kind of clear direction, for the promise of a pattern. For this relief--she pulled against the shoulder strap of her satchel--the unbearable relief of an omniscient narrator.

Adolescence, she reflected, pushing open the classroom door with a kind of savage glee, had nothing on this.”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

“matter how well you take care of the dying, no matter if you sit beside them every minute, every day—in the end they must go, and you stay.”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

“Then the ice on the black pathways through the park fixed an unreflecting gaze upward month after month, the cold unwavering through what should have been spring, so that even in April, in the Bowery in New York City, the braziers still glowed on street corners, and a man trying to warm his hands could watch the firelight picked up and carried in the windows above his head and imagine the glow traveling all the way along the avenues, square by square above the streets, all the way uptown and into the warm apartments of those who, pausing on the threshold to turn off the light, left their rooms and descended in woolens and furs, grumbling about the cold—good god, when will it end?—until it turned without fanfare one morning in May, and spring let loose at last.”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

“There is the crime and there is silence.”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

“No matter how well you take care of the dying, no matter if you sit beside them every minute, every day—in the end they must go, and you stay. And you wave them off. You lie.”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

“Most people he knew, his wife included, wouldn't make it through an hour on the promise of four sentences. But Frankie Bard was like a camel. She could hold her words for days--as long as she could watch the goings-on.”
― Sarah Blake, The Postmistress

“But it is a mistake to think news happens somewhere else. To others. The news is always about you.”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

“But I do know that all the chickies come home to roost in middle age.
Yeah?
You can spend your life shooing them away, locking the door, making the roof too shiny for a perch, too slippery; you can chop down all the trees around the house, never come home, keep moving, keep shifting so they don't come, they don't settle; you can sell your house. All the way through your twenties, your thirties, your forties you can do this, and then whammo, you hit your fifties, and there they come, there little fluttering, their hoo-hoos, the faint scratching of their claws upon your roof. Settling down, settling in ---”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

“She went to the church to sit in the cave of stone, filled with the voices of strangers. Murmurs coming through the air, bowling in the ceiling and sifting down with the speckled greens and blues, the deep dark red of the stained glass at the end of the nave. She sat in the hard wooden pew and waited for the hymns. And when the singing started, she could weep. She went to the church to open her mouth and feel her heart again, constricted, struggling, banging against her throat, the tears there in the place of words, her voice struggling out in the vast air, stopped by grief.”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

“Time and quiet, everyone counseled, would help. Best not to mention it. Best not to dwell on it, his mother had said. It was a terrible accident. It must have been hot. Windows were open at the time. And time would heal. Somethings were better left unsaid.”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

“All love stories beget ghost stories.”
― Sarah Blake, Grange House

“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.”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

“every life had at its center a beginning that was not birth, a moment when the catch on the lock in one’s life opens, and out it comes, starting forward.”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

“But it is a mistake to think news happens somewhere else. To others. The news is always about you. You must simply fit yourself in it. You must see how—you must be vigilant.”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book