Only The Beautiful Quotes
"The leafless stocks with their arms outstretched on cordon after cordon look like lines of dancers waiting for the music to start."
"What is to be gained by wishing I could turn back the clock?"
"The sound had been my favorite, those colors the prettiest."
"Promise me... Be happy... for me... and be... careful."
"It’s almost a year to the day since I first met Mrs. Grissom on the afternoon my whole world changed."
"If you want to keep working in the vineyard, I won’t stop you, but I think you should work at the big house."
"I don’t know if she heard me say I loved her, too."
"I look longingly at the vines as we pass them on the gravel drive, rows and rows of them."
"My mother’s cloisonné pendant—and the little key that shares its chain—are my only hope of survival now."
"I think you’ll find that I understand a great deal about what a person can see and hear that no one else can."
"This place would likely take my very soul if I let it. But I will not let it. I have a plan."
"I am about to say math had been hard and the colors relentless and the looks from my classmates upsetting. But I lasso those words before they fall from my lips."
"And I loved even more the notion that its bulb was a promise of beauty to come, despite the harshness of winter."
"I see an amaryllis brilliantly in bloom on Celine and Truman’s kitchen counter, a gift from Helen Calvert to help me bear my first Christmas without my family."
"I can see how what I am saying doesn’t make much sense, but I shrug as if I had just been a stupid girl who hadn’t thought things through."
"But I will not share this with the doctor. The bulb is gone now. What does it matter that I feel this way about it?"
"I swallow hard. 'I don’t see anything.' I tighten my grip on the armrests of my chair and hold his gaze—and my breath—willing the colors to fade."
"I can’t imagine staying in this place for endless months or years. It is an impossible notion."
"But his fascination about what I’d apparently told him when we were little didn’t feel like attraction as much as a desire to satisfy his curiosity."
"They don’t want people like us having children. They’re sterilizing people here."
"Sometimes you have to go relentlessly looking for your happiness, Rosie."
"I had been instructed that when I heard his car, I was to stay in my bedroom."
"The day when this life would be behind me and my new one would be starting, and I would say those words for myself and mean them."
"You think I’d be stupid enough to trust you twice?"
"You are a minor who does not have a home or a job or a high school diploma."
"If you want to tell people you see strange colors that no one else sees, I won’t be able to stop you."
"The world is full of rules, honestly it is. For all of us."
"It was the place where you needed to be assessed so that you could get the help you required."
"I resolve to mind my own business, hide the colors from everyone, obey Mrs. Clark’s rules, and quietly count off the twenty-four months."
"A life where the colors are my well-kept secret."
"I am reminded that there was a time when I thought I might take cooking classes and then find a nice job in a fancy restaurant."
"I’m finally successful the next day. Truman answers, and I hear in the background the chatter of other voices. He’s not alone."
"My newfound freedom is nearly intoxicating. To be able to go to the library whenever I want or the cinema or a department store or to stroll through the park unsupervised is almost too wonderful."
"Remembering her hurts like no other pain I have ever experienced, but the thought of forcing myself to forget her is impossible. I won’t. I can’t."
"I am Rosie no longer. That girl is gone. In her place is the woman who has been shaped from that pitiful child."
"The human heart is nothing at all like that."
"It always matters how well we know a person if we are going to make decisions regarding his or her well-being."
"I’m sorry I lied to you about that. I wanted to talk with you. Privately."
"Brigitta could have rallied if only she’d been able to have her mother hold her and soothe her fevered brow and sing to her."
"I knew Rosie Maras. She was kind to me. Quite kind."
"The past cannot be undone. I know this. I know I only have now. Today."
"I don’t know that there’s any way to have avoided this. I think it was always the Nazis’ plan to do what they did today."
"This family, without Brigitta, didn’t require a nanny anymore. The children were growing up, as children do."
"I will write you a letter of recommendation that you can take anywhere."
"I have a family member who knows someone at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. The führer has come up with a scheme to, as his friend would say, ease the burden of those whose quality of life has been impacted by age, illness, or disability."
"Power like that can't be stopped. Not with a magic wand or hopeful thoughts or wishful thinking or mere words, but with courage and resolve and the refusal to allow those without voices to remain unheard."
"Every good person everywhere should have said ‘no’ at the very beginning. There shouldn’t have been a ‘more.’ We waited too long."
"It’s because I want to change what is happening here in California. What was done to your mother is still happening here, and not just in California but all over the United States."
"I wanted to fight back the moment the Nazis first showed us what they wanted. What they hated. Every Nazi order you obeyed furthered their cause."
"This is what makes us sublimely human, isn’t it? Not unsullied genetic perfection, but when we stubbornly love and honor one another."
"You have every right to blame me for what happened to Brigitta. Martine does. The other children do."
"Perhaps it was silly to think the Austrian postal service might still forward something after two years. I don’t know why I tried again."
"A book can shine far brighter and longer than I ever could on my own."
"We all should have fought back the moment the Nazis first showed us what they wanted. What they hated."