Hello Beautiful Quotes
"The world had told him: He was a basketball player."
"Time became strange too. He felt like he would be locked in this cast, in this chair, in this house, forever."
"Off the basketball court, he had no usefulness. No one would miss him. If he disappeared, it would be like he’d never existed."
"Nothing was completely random, and therefore a line could be drawn from the assassination of an Austrian archduke to a world war."
"Her long, curly hair shifted around her bright face like curtains."
"In the middle of the quad, attention from a specific girl reeled in laughter from the nooks and crannies within him."
"He could see this beautiful girl’s desire for him, and he couldn’t believe his luck. No one had ever wanted him before."
"All four Padavano girls could recite these names better than the rosary."
"It’s not obliteration; it’s a kind of expanding, I think."
"When you grew up in a crowded, small house like they had, much of the dream of adulthood became living somewhere less crowded. Somewhere that was your own and didn’t need to be shared."
"She had never failed at anything she’d put her mind to, and this would be no different."
"This brand-new being seemed to be concentrating all of her tiny form on the act of living."
"Charlie just looked at Cecelia and the baby for a long moment. Then he smiled with so much warmth it was as if a sun had risen inside him."
"We look out the window, or into ourselves, for something more."
"You know that you’re more than a librarian’s aide and a college student, right? You’re Sylvie Padavano."
"We’re part of the sky, and the rocks in your mother’s garden, and that old man who sleeps by the train station."
"I felt like I was spilling out of my edges and messily trying to scoop myself up at the same time."
"The size of this manuscript, and the effort in its pages, showed that William had been in this place for a long time."
"What was Rose without her garden? Rose’s existence had always taken place in the garden."
"Sometimes, William, I feel like I’m having the baby with Sylvie, and you’re just some guy who lives here."
"She was a cheap bouncy ball in the middle of a gunfight."
"I choose what conversations I have, young lady. Not you. There’s no virtue in being mouthy."
"I miss you, Daddy. I wish you could have seen me as a mother."
"I can do both, Daddy. I’ll figure out how to do both."
"Sylvie started reading novels again and had the giddy pleasure of tipping into new fictional worlds."
"William was pretending to be a husband, but there wasn’t much left of him, and the clock would run out."
"I’m no good for you and Alice. If I stayed, I’d ruin your life. You deserve to be free, Julia. Our marriage is over. I’m sorry for everything."
"We’re like a clock that doesn’t keep time anymore."
"It felt like a memory from another life."
"This made no sense, of course, but from the moment Julia called her, Sylvie had been scared—scared as if her body knew something about this situation that her brain did not."
"Now, if they found William, it would be terrible, and if they didn’t find him, it would be the same."
"The fact that he had failed meant he had to continue to walk forward with his life history—his mistakes—slung over his shoulders like a heavy backpack."
"It’s not insane to be depressed in this world. It’s more sane than being happy."
"How could William have done something as embarrassing as trying to drown himself in Lake Michigan?"
"Was life with me so unbearable that he had to not only leave me but kill himself?"
"Life was opportunity, a chest of drawers to open, one after the other."
"Six months would offer a very different terrain from the hot coals her family was currently standing on."
"I’ve visited him a few times. I don’t want to tell Julia, but I can’t not tell you too."
"She wanted to be deeply and truly herself and to experience the world in the deepest and truest way."
"When he rested his eyes on her, it was without judgment or expectation, and in that space, Sylvie felt her potential: for bravery, brilliance, kindness, joy."
"Basketball was the first thing in William’s life that loved him back. The only thing that loved him, for a long time."
"What had happened in that room was how she’d always thought church should feel. The air seemed to break open, and what passed between them felt sacred."
"Every night, Sylvie sat at her tiny desk by the window, overlooking Pilse."
"She loved that she could see a fuller version of Emeline now, after she’d told Sylvie and Cecelia her truth."
"She wanted everything, because she could feel the walls they had both erected to hold back their desires, and she could sense the enormous beauty that lay on the far side of those walls."
"Like all the walls have been knocked down. Like we’re past needing a roof or doors. They’re irrelevant."
"Studying her, Sylvie remembered that when the girls were little, Rose had used the saints as inspiring examples of accomplished women."
"Sylvie dating William had been impossible, and yet it happened. Clearly, life was more alterable than Julia had thought."
"William had an appreciation for living in the center of a hard truth."
"Opportunity did not knock until I built the door."
"When Sylvie spoke their family history into the air, all she heard was love."
"Adults are idiots. My goal is to grow up and not be an idiot."
"Humans were prone to exaggeration; they leaned away from the parts of the narrative they found boring and leaned into the exciting spots."
"Alice felt some satisfaction that her very body—with its ridiculous, awkward height—was somehow the embodiment of the past that her mother refused to mention."
"People mistake my height for bravery. It’s been happening for a while now."
"How I live has nothing to do with my mother. I love her."
"Anyone that dresses and does their hair as carefully as your mom does every single day is unhappy on the inside. She’s trying to hide all her messiness, and I want better than that for you."
"The landscape had always looked like hope to her, and Sylvie needed some."
"I wish? Sylvie thought, but then stopped herself, because I wish was a dangerous path to walk down. She needed to stay with what is."
"The diagnosis had brought a physical longing for her older sister, a longing so deep that Sylvie felt breathless."
"Not anymore, he thought. William was going to lose everything that mattered to him. But first he could do everything possible to make Sylvie feel beloved and whole."
"I never saw two people love each other like you and Sylvie. I thought maybe it was just because of how I was raised, that I wasn’t exposed to that kind of thing, but that wasn’t it. I’ve never seen anything like you and your sister."
"And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier."
"Emeline had apparently written a narrative for her own life, and Sylvie had just erased the ending."
"The two girls would exist for as long as this wall stood."
"William used to worry about what he did and did not deserve, but no one around him seemed to think in these terms, and it turned out that he no longer did either."
"She was tying together who she’d been in the first half of her life with who she had become. She was stitching her life and heart together, and she wanted to keep it all before her: a beautiful whole."
"When your love for a person is so profound that it’s part of who you are, then the absence of the person becomes part of your DNA, your bones, and your skin."
"She had closed the valve to her past—to her heart, really—and a half-open valve was a broken one."
"She had been an idiot to stay away for so long, to give up time with her sister."
"William wanted to cup his hands again, to hold close his love for his wife, to hold close her love for him."
"She was painted into this family, mirrored in her father’s face."
"She was more abundant than she’d believed possible."
"But the big man in front of Alice looked like his ground had been pulled apart. He looked weary and kind."