Eowyn Ivey Quotes

#1. So I guess I wonder, where is the line separating me into this culture or that culture, saying I have less or more? I'm just me, and like most people, I've had my heart broken a few times, but for the most part I have been Happy.

Eowyn Ivey

#2. It was as if she had reached into her own pocket and discovered a small pebble, as hard as a diamond, that she had forgotten belonged to her.

Eowyn Ivey

#3. Carry me on and on to the edge of the earth, with children's laughter like a wind - full sail, then carry me beyond

Eowyn Ivey

#4. Then he returned to Mabel and put his mouth to her ear. I'd never let anything happen to you. You know that, don't you?

Eowyn Ivey

#5. She knew the snow and it carried her gently ... She knew the land by heart.

Eowyn Ivey

#6. If she couldn't convince anyone else, how could she go on believing?

Eowyn Ivey

#7. She'd say the girl needed warmth and affection and someone to look after her, but Jack had to wonder if that didn't have more to do with a woman's own desires than the needs of a child.

Eowyn Ivey

#8. When we are young, we consume the world in great gulps, and it consumes us, and everything is mysterious and alive and fills us with desire and wonder, fear and guilt.

Eowyn Ivey

#9. There is hope in our wanting to be something better, even if we never manage it. Maybe that is what I can hold to. The wanting.

Eowyn Ivey

#10. A boy trying out a man's language.

Eowyn Ivey

#11. I have only ever been truly frightened of boredom and loneliness," she says. It

Eowyn Ivey

#12. ...this rubbed like a small pebble in a boot. At first it seems like nothing but a nuisance, but eventually it hobbles you.
p 317

Eowyn Ivey

#13. Now he sat laughing with strangers, when he hadn't smiled at her in years.

Eowyn Ivey

#14. The leaden sky seemed to hold its breath.

Eowyn Ivey

#15. She might be curt and ungrateful, but by God she could bake.

Eowyn Ivey

#16. Why was it always the woman's fate to pace and fret and wait?

Eowyn Ivey

#17. He put one foot in front of the other and walked without seeing or feeling.

Eowyn Ivey

#18. They are only bats, nothing more," Mother said.
Father whispered to me alone, "These are no ordinary bats. These are mice who swim with the stars.

Eowyn Ivey

#19. remembered but not quite. I only hope by some

Eowyn Ivey

#20. That is the excitement. We catch only glimpses, a burst of movement, a flap of wings, yet it is life itself beating at shadow's edge. It is the unfolding of potential; all of what we might experience and see and learn awaits us. January

Eowyn Ivey

#21. When she first fell in love with Jack, she dreamed she could fly ...

Eowyn Ivey

#22. The days diminished. Light lasted just six hours, and it was a feeble light. Mabel organized her hours into patterns - wash, mend, cook, wash, mend, cook - and tried not to imagine floating beneath the ice like a yellow leaf.

Eowyn Ivey

#23. I don't know why, precisely. I believe we were in need of a change. We needed to do things for ourselves. Does that make any sense? To break your own ground and know it's yours, free and clear. Nothing taken for granted.

Eowyn Ivey

#24. Don't you see? This was to be ours together, the successes and the failures ... All of this? he said, and couldn't help a smile. Yes, all of this. Then she too smiled.

Eowyn Ivey

#25. We are allowed to do that, are we not Mabel? To invent our own endings and choose joy over sorrow?

Eowyn Ivey

#26. It would be a hard life, but it would be theirs alone. Here at the world's edge, far from everything familiar and safe, they would build a new home in the wilderness and do it as partners.

Eowyn Ivey

#27. I'll tell you one thing about history - we leave a lot of carnage in our wake.

Eowyn Ivey

#28. You start seeing things that you're afraid of ... or things you've always wished for.

Eowyn Ivey

#29. There are so man other labels people like to assign. Where am I an insider, and where am I an outsider? It all depends on where I'm standing and who is trying to put me into which box.

Eowyn Ivey

#30. To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as your were able before it slipped like water between your fingers.

Eowyn Ivey

#31. He thought Mabel would cry, and he wanted to be anywhere else. It was wrong and cowardly, and he'd done it before
when Mabel lost the baby and shook with grief ... But it was like the need to take a breath. The urge was too strong, and without saying another word, Jack left the cabin.

Eowyn Ivey

#32. The December days had a certain luminosity and sparkle, like frost on bare branches, alight in the morning just before it melts. Mabel

Eowyn Ivey

#33. He stood there a moment, listened to the creek, and let the mountain air blow against his face. Even with all this heartache, it was beautiful here.

Eowyn Ivey

#34. She looked directly up into the northern lights and she wondered if those cold-burning spectres might not draw her breath, her very soul, out of her chest and into the stars.

Eowyn Ivey

#35. In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.

Eowyn Ivey

#36. Like a rainbow trout in a stream, the girl sometimes flashed her true self to him.

Eowyn Ivey

#37. It was beautiful, Mabel knew, but it was a beauty that ripped you open and scored you clean so that you were left helpless and exposed, if you lived at all.

Eowyn Ivey

#38. No. Sometimes these things happen. Life doesn't go the way we plan or hope, but we don't have to be so angry, do we?" He

Eowyn Ivey

#39. She stared that color, trying to imagine a father who could name his child for such beauty and then abandon her.

Eowyn Ivey

#40. Doubt crouched over his shoulder, ready to take him by the throat, whispering in his ear, You are an old man. An old, old man.

Eowyn Ivey

#41. November was here, and it frightened her because she knew what it brought - cold upon the valley like a coming death, glacial wind through the cracks between the cabin logs. But most of all, darkness. Darkness so complete

Eowyn Ivey

#42. He expected to drown before she reached it.

Eowyn Ivey

#43. You'll drive yourself crazy looking for something that's not there.

Eowyn Ivey

#44. That is excitement. We catch only glimpses, a burst of movement, a flap of wings, yet it is life itself beating at shadow's edge. It is the unfolding of potential; all of what we might experience and see and learn awaits us.

Eowyn Ivey

#45. There's been a lot to get used to here." Esther laughed. "Isn't that the truth. I don't know if you ever get used to it really. It just gets in your blood so that you can't stand to be anywhere else.

Eowyn Ivey

#46. All those sounds of her failure and regret would be left behind, and in their place there would be silence.

Eowyn Ivey

#47. Was it as Ada suggested, that we can choose our own endings, joy over sorrow? Or does the cruel world just give and take, give and take, while we flounder through the wilderness?

Eowyn Ivey

#48. She seemed to him both powerful and delicate, like a wild thing that thrives in its place but withers when stolen away.

Eowyn Ivey

#49. She slid her boot soles onto the surface and nearly laughed at her own absurdity - to be careful not to slip even as she prayed to fall through.

Eowyn Ivey

#50. He goes not in search of obstacles, only the paths around them. Anything seems possible.

Eowyn Ivey

#51. We never know what is going to happen, do we? Life is always throwing us this way and that. That's where the adventure is. Not knowing where you'll end up or how you'll fare. It's all a mystery, and when we say any different, we're just lying to ourselves. Tell me, when have you felt most alive?

Eowyn Ivey

#52. Mabel was no longer sure of the child's age. She seemed both newly born and as old as the mountains, her eyes animated with unspoken thoughts, her face impassive. Here with the child in the trees, all things seemed possible and true.

Eowyn Ivey

#53. She watched Mabel mix bread dough, and it was as if a songbird had landed on a bedroom windowsill.

Eowyn Ivey

#54. The child's arms around her, hugging her as a daughter hugs her mother. Joyfully. Spontaneously. The most beautiful of all. The most beautiful of all.

Eowyn Ivey

#55. I can find no means to account for all that we have witnessed, except to say that I am no longer certain of the boundaries between man & beast, of the living & the dead. All that I have taken for granted, what I have known as real & true, has been called into question.

Eowyn Ivey

#56. As Jack knelt in the bloody snow, he wondered if that was how a man held up his end of the bargain, by learning and taking into his heart this strange wilderness - guarded and naked, violent and meek, tremulous in its greatness.

Eowyn Ivey

#57. As Jack's eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he saw the ground covered in white and, in the light of Garrett"s lantern, snowflakes spinning and falling.
He took hold of Mabel's hand, and when she turned to him, he saw in her eyes the joy and sorrow of a lifetime.
"It's snowing," she said.

Eowyn Ivey

#58. She and Jack had formed her of snow and birch boughs and frosty wild grass.

Eowyn Ivey

#59. I guess maybe I don't want to be warm and safe. I want to live.

Eowyn Ivey

#60. She wanted to look presentable, but not like an overdressed outsider.

Eowyn Ivey