The Book Of Goose Quotes
"Any experience is experience, any life a life. A day in a cloister can be as dramatic and fatal as a day on a battlefield."
"A fly dropped dead in the soup is as strange and laughable as a marriage proposal from a mere acquaintance."
"Am I passive? ... People close to you at one moment may disappear the next moment, but the sky is always there, whether you have a roof over your head or not."
"Two people who are constantly seeking experience rarely settle for each other."
"The days were getting longer. Fabienne’s two older brothers started to join their father at the bar in the evenings."
"It was a brilliant day in June, the sky cloudless after a night of rain."
"Happiness, I would tell her, is to spend every day without craning one’s neck to look forward to tomorrow, next month, next year."
"I have noticed that Americans are quick to call a person passive, which is never meant as a compliment."
"A few years earlier Fabienne and I had loved a game, tickling each other’s neck and face not with our fingers but with lightly blown air."
"To have a photographer coming to our village? 'But there’s nothing to photograph in my village,' I said."
"What do you want to see? What do you want to eat? What do you want to know? These questions, seemingly innocuous, are more unreasonable than people realize."
"Paris had so far only been the glimpses I caught from the car: boulevards and cafés and storefronts."
"Few of us would make a fool of ourselves in pressing the animals to give us serious answers about their lives, but we do that all the time to other people."
"Whatever happens in our lives is not real until we write it down."
"I was worried that she would offer to do that, and then she would see the letter would not be for my parents."
"He makes himself sound more important," Fabienne said. "Men always do that."
"Childhood friendship, much more fatal, simply happens."
"It’s like a game. We don’t know when the game is going to be over, but since we’ve already begun, we may as well stick with this one."
"We see ourselves every day, and yet how much do we really know about each other?"
"Some people can pretend so well that they cannot, in the end, tell the difference between pretending and being."
"It was a pretty room, really very pretty. The window overlooked the orchard, and the white lace curtain was so fine that I sometimes sat on the windowsill with it wrapped around me like a costume."
"Some of our hens are good layers, but they cannot explain how they lay the eggs."
"Rows of pale roses blossomed on the light blue wallpaper, each as beautiful and perfect as the next, all of them looking the same."
"You must understand, Agnès, that you’ve offered a rare opportunity to the world to observe how an underformed mind changes when subjected to a different environment."
"I know exactly what you mean. You were quoted to have said that in the press before. I don’t know if you came up with the analogy yourself or someone taught you to say so."
"You must always keep in mind that there is a gap between potential and one’s ability to realize it."
"Harmony, she explained, resides in finding the perfect balance between opposites."
"My understanding is that M. Chastain will publish a second one, set in the same place, and no doubt it’ll receive all the attention it deserves."
"What makes your first book remarkable is how you portrayed your village life with such brutal honesty."
"I have since encountered other versions of Catalina; each time I have to reeducate myself in avoiding people’s good intentions."
"I was not the first trespasser in paradise, but unlike other violators, my punishment was not banishment."
"It soon became my belief that my only hope for escape was to write the book that everybody wanted."
"When the book followed my journey to Woodsway, I described every floor of the house, the pattern of the rugs, the orchard outside my window."
"I wondered about writing Meaker into my book, not as the red-haired man with the bird nest on his head, but as my good friend."
"A week into the book, Mrs. Townsend asked me to show her what I had written thus far."
"That I know, but do you like what you’ve written?"
"But there are things I’m hoping to make better."
"You’ve also outgrown your attachment to fairy tales."
"You’re more confident, and you’ve captured something precarious and scintillating, true to a girl in your shoes."
"I’m not saying it’s perfect. There’s much to improve, I agree with you, but so far you’ve exceeded my expectations."
"Sometimes we have to carry on even if we feel unhappy."
"You have to let Mrs. Townsend know if you want to go home. You’re too young to make the decision by yourself."
"You’re here at the school fully supported by the scholarship I’ve raised on your behalf."
"I can’t have every decision about my life made by others."
"I’m afraid you’re too young to understand how things work."
"The girls at Woodsway, they all have decisions made for them by others."
"Calm down, Agnès. There’s no need to be hysterical."
"You’re not here to make decisions beyond your capacity."
"The fact that he put himself in a situation where you even discussed with him a plan to run away from the school—that alone was enough evidence that he should never be allowed to work in any school in the future."
"I thought after a night of sleep you may gain some perspective."
"She’s encouraged some unhealthy attachment from one of my students."
"I don’t understand. Meaker was employed by the school, and it was necessary to terminate his position."
"You can’t always expect me to make things happen for both of us, don’t you see?"
"We had fun with our games because they made us feel real."
"Why did you love him when you could’ve loved me?"
"It’s going to be pain and pain and pain and pain from now on, don’t you see it, Agnès?"
"You’re an idiot, Agnès. We don’t have forever. We don’t even have a long time."
"We are still us, you and me—nothing has changed for us."