A Slow Fire Burning Quotes
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A Slow Fire Burning Quotes
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“Everything is material. And comedy equals tragedy plus time. Isn’t that how it goes?”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“Angela was a vandal when it came to books: a cracker of spines, a dog-earer of pages, a scribbler in margins.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“Miriam had lost the talent for friendship when she was young, and once gone, it was a difficult thing to recover. Like loneliness, the absence of friendship was self-perpetuating: the harder you tried to make people like you, the less likely they were to do so; most people recognized right away that something was off, and they shied away.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“That we were all so happy. It seems unimaginable. All that happiness, wrecked.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“She glimpsed, opening up in front of her, the possibility of a quite different life from the one she currently led, a far richer (in the cultural sense), more peopled life.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“Nobody felt eighty. When Irene considered it, she thought that she probably felt somewhere around thirty-five. Forty, maybe. That was a good age to feel, wasn’t it? You knew who you were then. You weren’t still flighty or unsure, but you had not yet had time to harden, to become unyielding.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“He captured movement, he registered nuance, he was empathetic on the page in a way he never seemed to achieve in real life.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“Accidents do happen, and they especially happen to drunks, but mother and son, eight weeks apart? In fiction, that would never stand.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“Do you regret it?”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“When they’re born,” she said, her hand resting on the door handle, “you hold them, and you imagine a glorious, golden future. Not money or success or fame or anything like that, but happiness. Such happiness! You’d see the world burn if only it meant they would be happy.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“Irene had read in a newspaper article that the happiest people on earth were unmarried childless women. She could see why-there was a lot to be said for that sort of freedom, for not being answerable to anyone, for living exactly how you pleased. Only, once you'd fallen in love you could never be truly free, could you? It was too late by then.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“The truth was that you felt a certain way inside, and while the people who had known you your whole life would probably see you that way, the number of new people who could appreciate you as that person, that inside person, rather than just a collection of the frailties of age, was limited.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“She needed to tell him that she’d looked at his latest piece of writing too, that she didn’t like it, all the to-ing and fro-ing, all that jumping around in the timeline. Like the last one, the awful crime thing. Just start at the beginning, for God’s sake.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“Irene had read in a newspaper article that the happiest people on earth were unmarried childless women. She could see why—there was a lot to be said for that sort of freedom, for not being answerable to anyone, for living exactly how you pleased. Only, once you’d fallen in love you could never be truly free, could you? It was too late by then.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“So uneventful, she remembered almost nothing of it except for an oddly sepia-toned mental image of a terraced house on a narrow street, the sensation of dry, scratchy lawn beneath her feet in summer. Her memory seemed only to bloom into full color from around the age of nine,”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“to”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“There, in her imagination, was everything Irene feared—seeing herself reduced to a cliché of old age, a person without agency, without hope or future or intention, sitting by herself in a comfortable chair with a blanket over her knees, in the waiting room of death.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“Жінка без чоловіка, чи дитини, чи щеняти, яких можна любити, — вона холодна, хіба не так? Холодна, трагічна, певним чином недієздатна…”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“Життя не може складатися з одних веселощів, Джанін. Іноді людині доводиться бути дорослою.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“То була книжка, що показала, як можна маніпулювати симпатіями читачів, і викладати неприкриту правду про те, як ми похапцем робимо висновки про вину і невинність, владу й відповідальність.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“… дивно, як людина швидко починає по-новому оцінювати якість чиєїсь роботи, щойно її творець перестає бути абстрактною особою, прилизаною фотографією на суперобкладинці, а стає справжньою живою людиною, зі скромною усмішкою і смердючим собакою.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“Ірен колись читала в газеті статтю про те, що найщасливіші люди на світі — це незаміжні бездітні жінки. Вона розуміла чому, бо бачила численні переваги такої свободи: ні перед ким не відповідаєш, а живеш так, як самій хочеться. От лиш як закохаєшся — то вже ніколи не можеш бути істинно вільною, чи не так? Тоді вже запізно.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“in turn, watch her, fulfilling their expectations of the aged: sitting in a chair in a room, alone, musing on the past, on former glory, on missed opportunities, on the way things used to be. On dead people.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“Ніщо не вбиває надійніше за презирство, і презиоство до неї наросло в мені гарячою повінню”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“dead as a dodo,”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“The truth was that you felt a certain way inside, and while the people who had known you your whole life still probably saw you that way, the number of 'new' people who could appreciate you as that person, that 'inside' person, rather than just a collection of the frailties of age, was limited.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“You do far more exercise when you have a dog. It gets you out of the house, you know it does;”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“Carla was the sort of woman who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning
“fulfilling their expectations of the aged: sitting in a chair in a room, alone, musing on the past, on former glory, on missed opportunities, on the way things used to be. On dead people.”
― A Slow Fire Burning
― A Slow Fire Burning