Rae Meadows Quotes

#1. We know everyone we love is going to die, but we don't know it, can't possibly believe it, she thought, or long ago I would have gone and started digging until I had a hole big enough to lie down in.

Rae Meadows

#2. And it wasn't as if she could talk about it with Samuel, couldn't even imagine talking about it. Eventually she saw sex as part of being a wife.

Rae Meadows

#3. What does that matter when he makes me happy?" There was an adjustment her mother made then, a slight giving in, a relaxing of her shoulders, as if she wondered for just a moment what that kind of freedom might feel like.

Rae Meadows

#4. Stay calm," the mayor said, though it was unnecessary. They were calm, resigned to the storms that had, over these months, worn them thin. How fast a new normal took hold.

Rae Meadows

#5. Maybe God posted signs visible only to those with eyes to see. She wasn't one of them, but she could accept that maybe her husband was.

Rae Meadows

#6. Maybe next year. Everything was maybe next year.

Rae Meadows

#7. Annie watched them all walk together, like sleepwalkers, she thought, jackrabbits trying to outrun them. The two ends of the line pulled in to form a semicircle, a giant net of humanity. *

Rae Meadows

#8. She felt like the crushed petals of a violet, dark and limp. No, no, no. She bit her knuckle until she tasted blood. Cy was gone.

Rae Meadows

#9. Above the sink in the scratched mirror he looked grubby and bloated, his beard a grizzled mess. He knew what these men could never know: A man is who he is. That doesn't change. A thief is a thief. A bad man stays a bad man underneath. He'd been set at seventeen. "You want to end

Rae Meadows

#10. He has an idea. For wood. Or Styron does. Something about boxcars." "Boxcars?" "A mess of them at the old yard." "That's good news. That's real good news." He smiled, and she braced herself for the three words that she knew would follow. "The Lord provides," he said. She felt

Rae Meadows

#11. like upending the whole table, running until her lungs burned and her insides retched. With little wind,

Rae Meadows

#12. Beneath the damage she can still find moments of wonder, hints of joy. Would she even say she is optimistic? It isn't the shiny optimism that lifts Samuel, but it's a hard-won kind, born from the depths. A choice. It is enough.

Rae Meadows

#13. His dreams were getting more frightful - rising black swirls of water, cars floating by like river bugs - but he didn't know much about how to build a boat. The steam box was a start, even if he couldn't tell Annie, even though the line between faith and becoming unhinged seemed perilously narrow.

Rae Meadows

#14. In a span of months she had present for birth and for death, the wondrous first breath and the horrible last. But wasn't it an honor to be there at the end of life as well as the beginning? To mark the extraordinariness of a lifetime, to bear witness to its completion?

Rae Meadows