Top 100 Kim Edwards Quotes
#1. I had a great life even before 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' took off. I really enjoy teaching.
Kim Edwards
#2. After all these years, I feel so free. Who knows where I might fly?
Kim Edwards
#3. Many Lexington natives believe they live in a special place, one impossible to leave. I'm not so sure about that - or it's more accurate to say I think a more general truth exists beneath it: the place you first call home stays with you always, whether you remain or go.
Kim Edwards
#4. The year was 1922, and the Curies had transformed plain earth into something rare and unimagined. A secret of the universe has been revealed, and a restless world dreamed of transformation. [p. 205]
Kim Edwards
#6. I don't see how sucking the joy out of every aspect of life can be pleasing to anybody's God
Kim Edwards
#7. We all have secrets. We've all kept secrets. We've had secrets kept from us, and we know how that feels.
Kim Edwards
#8. I lived for two years in Odawara, a castle town an hour outside of Tokyo, near the sea. It's a beautiful place, and I drew on my experiences there when writing 'The Lake of Dreams.'
Kim Edwards
#9. In writing, I want to be remembered for telling good stories in beautiful and powerful language, using the poetry of words to reflect the thematic concerns of compelling stories.
Kim Edwards
#10. His discomfort seemed to soften her, for when he met her eyes again, they were kind.
Kim Edwards
#11. It's funny how things seem different, suddenly.
Kim Edwards
#12. I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.
Kim Edwards
#13. I have found that if you love your life ..
Life will love you back .!
Kim Edwards
#14. My first job was in a nursing home - a terrible place in retrospect. It was in an old house, and the residents were so lonely. People rarely visited them. I only stayed there a couple of months, but it made a strong impression on me.
Kim Edwards
#15. Your understanding of a place changes the longer you stay; you discover more, and your own life gets woven into the fabric of the community.
Kim Edwards
#16. His love for her was so deeply woven with resentment that he could not untangle the two.
Kim Edwards
#17. I imagine that she flushes, seeing him there, for she is at that age when even the most commonplace boys take on a sense of mystery. And this boy is not ordinary. He is wild and he has strange and fanciful perceptions. [p. 153]
Kim Edwards
#18. There was something not quite right about her eagerness, an eerie kind of voyeurism in her need for bad news.
Kim Edwards
#19. She saw herself moving through another life, an exotic, difficult, satisfying life.
Kim Edwards
#20. I always talk to my students about the need to write for the joy of writing. I try to sort of disaggregate the acclaim from the act of writing.
Kim Edwards
#21. Either things grow and change or they die.
Kim Edwards
#22. Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.
Kim Edwards
#23. It's always like this after a few days here. I start to lose my bearings. The surface is one way, but then there are all these other things going on, sometimes going back decades, swirling undercurrents that I just don't understand. [p. 336]
Kim Edwards
#24. You can't spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won't work. You'll just end up missing the life you have.
Kim Edwards
#25. He wished he had some kind of X-ray vision for the human heart.
Kim Edwards
#26. The place was a familiar as breath but as far from his life now as the moon.
Kim Edwards
#27. Caroline said easily, amazed all over again at this sudden facility she'd developed, the fluidity and ease of her lies.
Kim Edwards
#28. The Iroquois take dreams very seriously. They see them as the secret wishes of the soul
the heart's desire, so to speak. Not all dreams, maybe, but the important ones. [p.254]
Kim Edwards
#29. A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how.
Kim Edwards
#30. The way we behave, our views and outlooks really have their sources some place. They come from somewhere. Sometimes we don't even know what they are, and yet they're very powerful in our lives.
Kim Edwards
#31. Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.
Kim Edwards
#32. Norah watched him, serious and utterly absorbed in his task, overcome by the simple fact of his existence.
Kim Edwards
#33. The thing is, I used to like that: feeling special because I knew something no one else did. It's a kind of power, isn't it, knowing a secret? But lately I don't like it so much, knowing this. It's not really mine to know, is it?
Kim Edwards
#34. ...her tone more disapproving than dismayed.
Kim Edwards
#35. So young, so lonely and naive, that she imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasn't like that. The love was within her all the time and its only renewal came from giving it away.
Kim Edwards
#36. Once, this whole world had been hidden beneath a shallow sea.
Kim Edwards
#37. I wondered if I could call my experience in the chapel prayer
not a long list of asking, after all, or a rote string of words, but rather a kind of sacred listening. [p, 355]
Kim Edwards
#38. The secret at the heart of 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' is something everybody, except for some of the characters, knows in Chapter 1. Some of the narrative tension comes from that distance between what the readers know and what the characters know.
Kim Edwards
#39. You can't stop time. You can't capture light. You can only turn your face up and let it rain down.
Kim Edwards
#40. Paul, careening down the slide with his arms out flung, and Phoebe, present somehow through her absence.
Kim Edwards
#41. For this is what I have learned, in my short life: do not act out of anger. Act from love or not at all. I have seen it, how anger makes a space for what I must call evil.
Kim Edwards
#42. I find my husband's family history fascinating, as they can trace the family lineage back to ancestors who fought, and died, in the first battle of the Revolution, as well as to many other interesting people.
Kim Edwards
#43. All day she had been dreaming of the comet, its wild and fiery beauty, what it might mean, how her life might change.
Kim Edwards
#44. 'Middlesex' by Jeffrey Eugenides left me both moved and, at times, laughing out loud in delight.
Kim Edwards
#45. I hadn't really thought about this until 'The Lake of Dreams,' but I've set all my stories in places that are familiar to me. It frees me up to spend more imaginative time on the characters.
Kim Edwards
#46. It shocked me, the strength of the image, the desire I had to see if it might happen this way- though I couldn't tell if it was really desire in the present or leftover from the past.
Kim Edwards
#47. It seemed there was no end at all to the lies a person could tell, once she got started.
Kim Edwards
#48. We have a choice. To be bitter and angry, or to try and move on. It's the hardest thing for me, letting go of all that righteous anger. I'm still struggling. But that's what I want to do.
Kim Edwards
#49. It wasn't right. He knew that, but it was like falling: once you started you couldn't stop until something stopped you.
Kim Edwards
#50. A film closed over the past as she spoke, a barrier as brittle and fragile as ice forming. It would grow and strengthen. It would become impenetrable, opaque.
Kim Edwards
#51. In some deep place in her heart, Caroline had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry had once known her as no one else ever could. But it was not true. He had never even glimpsed her.
Kim Edwards
#52. You don't want to engage in road rage when the person in the next car might be your child's future teacher or your dentist's father.
Kim Edwards
#53. I think that the whole child welfare system has to be totally taken apart and built up again. Have an agency just specifically for those follow-up cases.
Kim Edwards
#54. There was a sense that there was a lot of word of mouth happening with 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter,' even in hardcover.
Kim Edwards
#55. Lately, the world felt fragile, like a blown egg, as if it might shatter beneath a careless touch.
Kim Edwards
#56. The world beyond the water was a blue of green and stone and blue. A moment later Yoshi pushed through, the water pouring down in sheets so smooth it looked like glass, and stepped into the calm [p. 296]
Kim Edwards
#57. A fear Paul had transformed all these years, like a gifted alchemist, into anger and rebellion.
Kim Edwards
#58. I love to swim, and I love being near water.
Kim Edwards
#59. So something had begun, and now she could not stop it. Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement. She could leave this place today. She could start a new life somewhere else.
Kim Edwards
#60. After 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' it took me a few months to shut out the world. I really had to turn off the Internet and sort of cloister myself away from the world again and sink into that psychic space to write again.
Kim Edwards
#61. I've always set my stories in places I know well. It frees me up to spend more imaginative time on the characters if I'm not worrying about the logistics.
Kim Edwards
#62. You don't know when you are immersed in a book what the reaction to it will be, but I feel great about 'The Lake of Dreams.'
Kim Edwards
#63. Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement.
Kim Edwards
#64. I swam across Skaneateles Lake, about a mile, when I was 11 years old. I remember feeling when I was in the middle of the lake that I would be there forever, and having no idea where on shore I'd end up. I made it, and I'm proud of the determination and persistence that took.
Kim Edwards
#65. One of my greatest times of inspiration is when I'm traveling or living in a new country - there's a tremendous freedom that comes from being unfettered by your own, familiar culture, and by seeing the world from a different point of view.
Kim Edwards
#66. He liked that bones were solid things, surviving even the white heat of cremation. Bones would last; it was easy for him to put his faith in something so solid and predictable.
Kim Edwards
#67. I think that it would be hard to find a family that didn't have a secret in it somewhere, and sometimes we know about them, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we have an inkling that there's something hidden, but I think that it touches everybody's life.
Kim Edwards
#69. She had read about people-where? she could not remember this either- who refused to name their children for several weeks, feeling them to not be yet of the earth, suspeded still between two worlds.
Kim Edwards
#70. That there were other worlds, invisible, unknown, beyond imagination even, was a revelation to him.
Kim Edwards
#71. Writing is always a process of discovery - I never know the end,or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There is a constant interplay between the imagining and shaping of the story.
Kim Edwards
#72. Music is like you touch the pulse of the world. Music is always happening, and sometimes you get to touch it for a while, and when you do you know that everything's connetcted to everything else.
Kim Edwards
#73. I just couldn't do it- break all the rules. Blow everything up."
"The world doesn't end," Bree said quietly. "Amazing, but it really doesn't.
Kim Edwards
#74. As a writer and as a reader, I really believe in the power of narrative to allow us ways to experience life beyond our own, ways to reflect on things that have happened to us and a chance to engage with the world in ways that transcend time and gender and all sorts of things.
Kim Edwards
#75. I haven't done any genealogical exploring myself, though members of my family and also of my husband's family have traced things back. I have a great grandfather on my mother's side who was a musician, and I'd like to know more about his life.
Kim Edwards
#76. You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy.
Kim Edwards
#77. Though my stories aren't autobiographical, I do sometimes use things from my life.
Kim Edwards
#78. A moment might be a thousand different things.
Kim Edwards
#79. Lexington is home to the University of Kentucky, where my husband and I teach, as well as to Transylvania University, the oldest college established west of the Allegheny Mountains, and several multinational companies; people come and go from all over the world.
Kim Edwards
#80. I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.
Kim Edwards
#81. They can learn- they must learn- to appreciate the history of their good fortune through the experiences of those who not only witnessed history, but made it.
Kim Edwards
#82. Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.
Kim Edwards
#83. Grief, it seemed, was a physical place.
Kim Edwards
#84. She seemed not to worry very much about ghings, but rather to accept the world as a fascinating and unusual place where anything might happen
memory keepers daugher
Kim Edwards
#85. I don't think we'll ever lose the desire for people to tell stories or to hear stories or to be entrapped in a beautiful story.
Kim Edwards
#86. Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere. - Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers
Kim Edwards
#87. Dinosaurs drank this water, did you know that? Water moves forever in a circle; someday, little ones, your grandchildren may even drink your tears.
Kim Edwards
#88. The city of Pittsburgh gleaming suddenly before her ... so startling in its vastness and its beauty that she had gasped and slowed, afraid of losing control of the car
Kim Edwards
#89. This is what he knew that Paul didn't: the world was precarious and sometimes cruel. He'd had to fight hard to achieve what Paul simply took for granted.
Kim Edwards
#91. She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love
nothing, now, but bones.
Kim Edwards
#92. 'The Lake of Dreams' grew gradually, over many years, elements and ideas accruing until they gained enough critical mass to become a novel.
Kim Edwards
#93. No one could suspect the intricate mysteries of her heart.
Kim Edwards
#94. Away from the bright motion of the party, she carried her sadness like a dark stone clenched in her palm.
Kim Edwards
#95. It's impossible to control the reception of your work - the only thing you can control is the experience of writing itself, and the work you create.
Kim Edwards
#96. But she had felt since childhod that her life would n ot be ordinary. A moment would come- she would know it when she saw it- and everything would change.
Kim Edwards
#98. I've been accused of trying too hard to rescue people
Kim Edwards
#99. And the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood.
Kim Edwards
#100. Think of it, Dad. What if I have it in me to do that, and I don't try?
Kim Edwards
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