Crow Lake Quotes
"I’m not recounting that little bit of family lore just for the sake of it."
"What took place between Matt and me can’t be explained without reference to Great-Grandmother."
"She had fourteen children in thirteen years and five hundred acres of barren farmland."
"Matt was ten years older than I, tall and serious and clever."
"Tomorrow is forever, and years pass in no time at all."
"There's no end to how far back you can go, when you’re trying to figure out where something started."
"Emotions, even positive ones, were kept firmly under control."
"Memories. I’m not in favor of them, by and large."
"Here's the question, Katie: Is he very very determined, or is his memory so short that he forgets what happened two seconds ago, so he always thinks he's doing it for the first time? That's the question."
"You weren’t supposed to throw the soap onto the beach because it was almost impossible to get the sand out of it."
"You want me to describe Mr. Pye? I think he's probably insane."
"It was totally illogical—feeling ashamed of something you did in a dream."
"There is something about water, even if you have no particular interest in the life-forms within it."
"Families are not like pebbles, whose edges are smoothed down as they rub against one another. They are more like stones in an archway, each holding the other up."
"I think he's probably insane. That's my opinion."
"You could see him considering adjectives and rejecting them."
"The fact that the ending of life was part of the pattern."
"I recommend it, by the way—pond watching—as therapy."
"Love goes deeper than anything else, I guess."
"The world was spreading itself out before me."
"I had discovered by then that Great-Grandmother Morrison was more right than she knew about the power of education."
"I was studying too hard to give much thought to it."
"Calvin had never stood up to his own father, according to Miss Vernon. Laurie did. Laurie would not be cowed."
"Empathy, as Daniel says, is not my strong point, and it is more difficult still to empathize with someone you don’t like."
"He said that it was hard to accept that sometimes, in spite of all your efforts, things just didn’t work out."
"They answered him then, first Luke and then Matt, and gave their undertakings."
"He told me then that for all creatures, from the single-celled to the most complex, the main purpose in life was to reproduce."
"I hope she knew we were grateful to her. No—I’ll rephrase that. I hope we were grateful to her."
"Nothing noble in giving up something you didn’t want anyway."
"But I knew I wasn’t sick. The old expression 'sick at heart' came to me."
"The thing is—and it shows how well he taught me, during our years together—I did see. I saw that he had to go."
"Everything I now was, I owed to him. All the years of watching him, learning from him, coming to share his passion—how could I not be affected by the way things had turned out?"
"I lay awake for half an hour or so, listening to the movements of the house and thinking about things long gone."
"It is the pauses that I dread in my conversations with Matt."
"I have pursued your dream single-mindedly; I have become familiar with books and ideas you never even imagined, and somehow, in the process of acquiring all that knowledge, I have managed to learn nothing at all."
"Marie seemed to be watching us. I couldn’t make out her expression."
"The world kept on turning. Marie organized us, after a fashion."
"I felt lightheaded. Unreal. It was almost pleasant."
"The evening will stay with me. After supper, when the clearing up was done and Simon had gone off with his friends, Matt and I sprayed Daniel from head to toe with insect repellent and took him back to the ponds."
"I wondered if she was worrying about him. I was sure he was far too streetwise to make his father's mistakes, but still, she might be worrying."
"The weight of twelve years’ worth of things unsaid, unresolved, had made strangers of us."
"I tried to imagine writing to him, telling him about all that I was doing—all that he should have been doing."