Hannah Coulter Quotes
"I picked him up in my arms and I carried him home."
"Past that day he told no more stories about himself."
"Our story is the story of our place: how we married and came here, moved into this old house and made it livable again."
"You’re too good and too smart to go to waste."
"I’m telling you now so you can think about it and get your mind in order."
"You must make yourself at home here, Hannah."
"I had not the least idea what she saw, but I understood pretty quick that she was looking ahead."
"It’s time that boy was getting married, but I don’t know who around here would be good enough."
"Some day there will be a new heaven and a new earth."
"The story of even so small a place can never be completely told and can never be finished."
"It is eternal, always here and now, and going on forever."
"Port William has always been, and maybe too that it will always be."
"To be in love with Virgil was to be there, in love, with his parents, his family, his place, his baby."
"Like maybe any young woman of that time, I had thought of marriage as promises to be kept until death."
"It is hard for me to think or speak of the time that came then. I remember it as dark."
"Kindness held us. We were suffering what we were living by."
"I began to know my story then. Like everybody’s, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead."
"Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery."
"Love is a great room with a lot of doors, where we are invited to knock and come in."
"I was grateful because I knew, even in my fear and grief, that my life had been filled with gifts."
"To know that I was known by a new living being...changed me."
"The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible."
"Who can speak for the dead? Who can speak for the dead whose bodies are never found, who are forever 'missing'?"
"Their lives made the meaning of their deaths, and that is the meaning their deaths ought to have."
"The important thing is to feel good and be proud of what you got, don't matter if it ain't nothing but a log pen."
"The place doesn’t care if you love it. But for your own sake you had better love it."
"Love in this world doesn't come out of thin air. It is not something thought up. Like ourselves, it grows out of the ground."
"We were each other's welcomer and each other's guest."
"There is no 'better place' than this, not in this world."
"The history of a place is the mind of an old man or an old woman who knows it, walking over it."
"The dead are helpless. The living must protect the dead."
"The hardest resentments to give up are the ones you felt knowingly as a child."
"I had enough imagination to know what a life I would have lived if it had not been for Grandmam."
"The thought, when I had it on my mind, was like a grain of corn in my shoe."
"I knew at the same instant that my resentment was gone, just gone."
"You have got to have hope, and you mustn’t shirk it."
"The world that so often had disappointed us and made us sorrowful sometimes made us happy by surprise."
"You think winter will never end, and then, when you don’t expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and a different light."
"The pastures turn green and the leaves come."
"Life without expectations was still life, and life was still good."
"You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was."
"It is always going to be proving itself worse or better than you hoped."
"Living without expectations is hard but, when you can do it, good."
"Sometimes, too, Nathan’s eagerness in his work would come across as nothing but impatience."
"What you must do is this: 'Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks.'"
"The absent and the dead are in it. And the living are in it."
"It wasn’t always anger that came between us. Work could come between us."
"The life of membership with all its cumbers is traded away for the life of employment that makes itself free by forgetting you clean as a whistle when you are not of any more use."
"They wanted the children to study and learn and behave themselves reasonably well, but I don’t think they felt any pressure from the future."
"Every one of them seemed to have a perfect faith in the education they got outside of school."
"Compared to nearly everybody else, the Branches have led a sort of futureless life."
"They aren’t going any place, they aren’t getting ready to become anything but what they are, and so their lives are not fretful and hankering."
"They survive and go on because they like where they are and what they are doing."
"Lyda and I have loved each other for a long time."
"Even old, your husband is the young man you remember now."
"Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door."
"I am in need of presents to give on those days too, of course, but I am a lot less certain of what to get."
"I need Lyda for that. She is the best present buyer that ever was."
"It is entirely a gift. There is a silence here now that is the absence of many voices."
"I read books, whose voices don’t disturb the silence."
"I don’t want to be worn all to holes like an old shirt no good for rags."
"He was not false or greedy. When the time came to go, he went."
"You can’t give yourself over to love for somebody without giving yourself over to suffering."
"It was a battle of both armies making war against a place and its people."
"Everything standing was destroyed: houses, trees, gardens, tombs, towns."
"I am giving some thought to putting it into a land trust, to keep it from ever being developed."
"I have lived from it all these years. When I am buried in it at last my flesh will be the same as it, and hardly a difference made."
"This Virgie of mine, this newfound 'Virge,' is the last care of my life."
"I want to leave here openhanded, with only the ancient blessing, 'Good-bye. My love to you all.'"