The Thirteenth Tale Quotes
"All children mythologize their birth... What you get won’t be the truth; it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story."
"A good story is always more darling than a broken piece of truth."
"When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story."
"People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases."
"Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved."
"I once did an interview for the Banbury Herald... A boy, really. As tall as a man, but with the puppy fat of youth."
"My name is Vida Winter. I went through the necessary legal procedures in order to be able to call myself by that name legally and honestly."
"Life is compost... You think that a strange thing to say, but it’s true."
"Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical... But it’s true, but not in the way they think."
"One gets so used to one’s own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people."
"Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating."
"Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight."
"A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else’s story."
"One should always pay attention to ghosts, shouldn’t one?"
"It is impossible to know whether or not these facts are connected."
"Such thinking is pointless. Isabelle was as Isabelle was, and that is all there is to say about the matter."
"Their neglect of the twins was her chance, she hoped, to break the pattern."
"In the end, the force of the Missus’s conviction held them paralyzed, and they did nothing."
"Consistent adult behavior is said to be good for children, and consistent neglect certainly suited this child."
"He behaved, in short, as though Isabelle was a sensible, pleasant companion and not a wild and ignorant child."
"Nothing could touch the great passion in his life: his feelings for Isabelle."
"I’m glad I’m not some poor soul caught outdoors away from home on a night like this."
"I knitted a sock for my young man... I undid it. All those little knots... they just fall apart."
"I heard it again. It seemed to be calling me."
"The third time, and it was life that came to the door."
"That taught me not to go reading too much into coincidences."
"I don’t care how you do it. I don’t care what it looks like. Just get rid of it."
"You’re the daughter of the house. He’s a gardener. For God’s sake, Emmeline!"
"It’s all right. It will pass. Hush, child. You’re not alone."
"He was a good man. A good man. And he loved you."
"One cannot live by such principles. Imagine the time it would take if every aspect of experience had to be scrutinized afresh every minute of every day."
"No one can think clearly and make progress if she is not surrounded by hygiene and order."
"The violence of a child is not a side effect of rage but a motive in itself, demanding energy to destroy rather than create."
"To guard against errors, one would have to teach oneself to view everything without preconception, to abandon all habitual modes of thought."
"Jealousy and anger between siblings is commonplace, but in twins, rivalries are frequently heightened."
"I find the scientific and intellectual work more engrossing and more satisfying than anything I have ever done."
"Despite my reserves of energy, I can distinguish the symptoms of sleep deprivation."
"The satisfaction of working alongside someone on a project is not in the findings, but in the pattern of our minds, the fluency with which we understand each other."
"It is a cardinal rule that I do not chase my charges, but train them to come to me."
"No tuberculosis, no childhood polio, no unhygienic living conditions. You'll survive."