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The Optimist's Daughter QUOTES

The Optimist's Daughter QUOTES

1 " The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Survival is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all. "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

2 " The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought. "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

3 " She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams. "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

4 " Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged? "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

5 " And perhaps it didn't matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful. "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

6 " For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love. "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

7 " At their very feet had been the river. The boat came breasting out of the mist, and in they stepped. All new things in life were meant to come like that. "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

8 " At the sting in her eyes, she remembered for him that there must be no tears in his. "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

9 " For there is hate as well as love, she supposed, in the coming together and continuing of our lives. "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

10 " Up home we loved a good storm coming, we’d fly outdoors and run up and down to meet it,” her mother used to say. “We children would run as fast as we could go along the top of that mountain when the wind was blowing, holding our arms right open. The wilder it blew the better we liked it. "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

11 " He, who had once been the declared optimist, had not once expressed hope. Now it was she who was offering it to him. And it might be false hope "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

12 " For every book here she had heard their voices, father's and mother's. And perhaps it didn't matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful. "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

13 " Sounds from the highway rolled in upon her with the rise and fall of eternal ocean waves. They were as deafening as grief. Windshields flashed into her eyes like lights through tears. "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

14 " When, sometime later, Laurel asked about the bell, her mother replied calmly that how good a bell was depended on the distance away your children had gone. "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

15 " Her father left his questions unasked. But both knew, and for the same reason, that bad days go better without any questions at all. "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

16 " There was a deep boom, like the rolling in of an ocean wave. The hearse door had been slammed shut. "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

17 " As they proceeded there, black wings thudded in sudden unison, and a flock of birds flew up as they might from a ploughed field, still shaped like it, like an old map that still served new territory, and wrinkled away in the air. "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

18 " Laurel had watched him prune. Holding the shears in both hands, he performed a sort of weighty sarabande, with a lop for this side, then a lop for the other side, as though he were bowing to his partner, and left the bush looking like a puzzle. "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

19 " But the guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne, she thought. Outliving is something we do to them. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all. "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter

20 " You know, sir, this operation is not, in any hands, a hundred percent predictable?"
"Well, I'm an optimist."
"I didn't know there were any more such animals," said Dr. Courtland.
"Never think you've seen the last of anything, "

― Eudora Welty , The Optimist's Daughter