Amanda Coplin Quotes

#1. She was both more assured and quieter, deeper. It was as if the distance she had traveled had ironed out some of her foolish impulsiveness, her flippancy.

Amanda Coplin

#2. She was haunted by the possibility that she had missed her chance for happiness. But she had not missed her chance, she told herself, for her chance would not let her get away so easily. Each morning she was fortified by hope: the future loomed.

Amanda Coplin

#3. The sorrow came from those two feelings - the happiness of company, the anxiety of interrupted solitude.

Amanda Coplin

#4. When one is young, he thought, one thinks that one will never know oneself. But the knowledge comes later; if not all, then some. An important amount.

Amanda Coplin

#5. The odor of the room was baked fruit, beeswax, pine, and old newspapers.

Amanda Coplin

#6. She was becoming what she was destined to become ... : her own person, her own independent and particular self.

Amanda Coplin

#7. She revered solitude, but only because there was the possibility of breaking it. Of communing at last with another.

Amanda Coplin

#8. Where some women wanted mere privacy, she yearned for complete solitude that verged on the violent; solitude that forced you constantly back upon yourself, even when you did not want it anymore.

Amanda Coplin

#9. THERE CAME AGAIN, during that following spring and summer, the feeling that Angelene had almost forgotten, of being alone in the orchard, of being utterly herself.

Amanda Coplin

#10. He did not expect her to be happy - how that word lost meaning as the years progressed - but he only wished her to be unafraid, and able to experience small joys.

Amanda Coplin

#11. How lovely, the portraitist kept saying. How lovely.

Amanda Coplin

#12. He did not go after her himself, but those months after he fell out of the tree, though his physical wounds more or less healed - though he walked with a slight limp afterward - a kind of vacancy, a silence, hung around him, like a mantle on his shoulders.

Amanda Coplin

#13. She could strive for perfection only in certain, few things; beyond that, it was important only to be tidy.

Amanda Coplin

#14. Objects too at times, after all, like the landscape, held the potential for meaning- she took out the first object now- and were able to comfort.

Amanda Coplin

#15. The sound was loud and soft at the same time, like the sound upon which other sound was built. You didn't hear the horses until you listened for them; and then they were very loud.

Amanda Coplin

#16. We do not belong to ourselves alone, she wanted to say, but there was no one to speak to.

Amanda Coplin

#17. But she did not know where the doubt, the fear, began. It had always been there, but she had sought to rearrange it within herself; and in the constant rearrangement was transformation.

Amanda Coplin

#18. In the schoolhouse north of Cashmere, along the river, Angelene sat near the window that looked out onto a large cottonwood. She drew courage from that tree, which seemed to have been planted there for the sole purpose of being her friend.

Amanda Coplin

#19. her cheeks splotched red from the cold, as she

Amanda Coplin

#20. The night has made up its mind. It's we who are too slow, who move in the wake of events already decided for us, who refuse, who are too weak or too simple, or are perhaps, strictly, unable to understand

Amanda Coplin

#21. And that was the point of children, thought Caroline Meddey: to bind us to the earth and to the present, to distract us from death.

Amanda Coplin

#22. She craved it for some reason- she would not look at it directly- that sense of despair.

Amanda Coplin

#23. You belong to the earth and the earth is hard.

Amanda Coplin