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Ashley Hay QUOTES

Ashley Hay QUOTES

1 " ---Sleeps through the washes of the morning's colors and the warm brilliance of sunrise. She sleeps in a world where she remembers, perfectly, every detail about her husband, this day, that sentence, another touch. She will remember it all in the deepest sleep, and lose it again the moment her eyes open and she wonders how late it must be for the sun to already be so high and then remembers, in the next instant, what happened the day before. "

― Ashley Hay , The Railwayman's Wife

2 " Such fascinating things, libraries. She closes her eyes. She could
walk inside and step into a murder, a love story, a complete account
of somebody else’s life, or mutiny on the high seas. Such potential;
such adventure—there’s a shimmer of malfeasance in trying other
ways of being. "

― Ashley Hay , The Railwayman's Wife

3 " There’s some comfort in seeing things go on; birds keep singing, buses keep running. But if you want those things to continue, perhaps you have to accept that the other kinds of things, unhappier, even horrific ones, will continue too. And that’s harder. "

― Ashley Hay , The Railwayman's Wife

4 " How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line—how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined—well, a good poem. "

― Ashley Hay , The Railwayman's Wife

5 " That is marriage, he thought, remaking yourself in someone else’s image. And who knew where the truth of it began or would end? "

― Ashley Hay , The Railwayman's Wife

6 " The oceans and the skies…and the sun coming up each new day. That’s all there is, I think. That’s all that matters to think on. "

― Ashley Hay , The Railwayman's Wife

7 " They'd had a long chat, Elsie Gormley and this house, more than sixty years of it. It had witnessed all her tempers, all her moods, and usually improved them. It held her voice, her husband's, her children's, and now their children's in turn - echoes and repetitions lodged in around the baseboards, around the window frames like those pale motes of dust that had wedged at the edge of the kitchen floor. "

― Ashley Hay , A Hundred Small Lessons

8 " All the things they'd brought into this house; all of Elsie's things, packed up and taken away. A world delineated by this ebb and flow of items. The stuff of people's lives. "

― Ashley Hay , A Hundred Small Lessons

9 " there were spirits who traveled ahead of you in time, doing the things you’d do next. Alone in the house, she stood still to remember their name. Not a doppelgänger. Not an alter ego. Vardøger: that was it. It was Norwegian. She’d typed a paper for someone once—a professor in London, who specialized in Norse mythology—and she’d liked the sound of these creatures. “They never threaten, never frighten,” he told her. “Some people hear the vardøger; some people see them. Perhaps you hear something busily going about its business and doing whatever it does. And then, a short while later, the person themself arrives, and does all those things. It’s like a premonition, a future self. "

― Ashley Hay , A Hundred Small Lessons

10 " That line in Shakespeare, you know: ‘there was a star danced, and under that was I born,’ ” she’d once told him. “That’s the only Shakespeare I remember from school. "

― Ashley Hay , A Hundred Small Lessons

11 " For his first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased. "

― Ashley Hay , A Hundred Small Lessons

12 " Houses could feel so different when you had them to yourself. "

― Ashley Hay , A Hundred Small Lessons

13 " He was never able, really, to see things other than the way they were, he believed, and he took some pride in that. "

― Ashley Hay , A Hundred Small Lessons

14 " I will say this once," her mother said. "You can put your foot down about this. You can have your tantrum. But get used to the fact that you're going to be a mother - and no matter how much you've been in control of all the other parts of your life, you're about to enter into a thing that you can never control entirely. Ever. "

― Ashley Hay , A Hundred Small Lessons

15 " Because color meant life - humans, or animals, or plants, with their different petals, their changeable leaves, the way their chlorophyll pulsed bright and vital with the warmth of the sun. "

― Ashley Hay , A Hundred Small Lessons

16 " Is that what it feels like, coming here? Like a crazy decision that took you away and made you some lesser version of yourself? "

― Ashley Hay , A Hundred Small Lessons

17 " ... I just think it's funny the way my brain tries to make sense of strange places by imagining its people are familiar. "

― Ashley Hay , A Hundred Small Lessons

18 " Some girl once read me a poem," Ben said after a while, as the kettle sang, "about all the things we can remember from all the other lives we've had, for forty days after we're born. 'Some great forty-day daydream," he pulled the line from the crevasses of his memory, and he wasn't sure how, "before we bury the maps.' Maybe it's not forty days; maybe it's all your dreams in childhood, bits of memory you can't decipher because they belong to a person you no longer are.... "

― Ashley Hay , A Hundred Small Lessons

19 " He felt the room's walls solid around him. This house, his wife, his kids: that was what defined him. He sought no purchase on the world beyond these things. "

― Ashley Hay , A Hundred Small Lessons

20 " He had loved her without question and he had loved her without pause; she was certain of that. He had thought the best of her always; he'd brought her the one life sh'd wanted. Who would she be now, she wondered, without him? Who was Elsie Gormley if Clem Gormley's idea of her was no longer alive? "

― Ashley Hay , A Hundred Small Lessons