The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy
Rachel Joyce
Top 10 Best Quotes
“All these years I thought a piece of my life was missing. But it was there all along. It was there when I sat beside you in your car and you began to drive. It was there when I sang backwards and you laughed or I made a picnic and you ate every crumb. It was there when you told me you liked my brown suit, when you opened the door for me, when you asked once if I would like to take the long road home. It came later in my garden. When I looked at the sun and saw it glow on my hands. When a rosebud appeared where there had not been one before. It was in the people who stopped and talked of this and that over the garden wall. And just when I thought my life was done, it came time and time again at the hospice. It has been everywhere, my happiness – when my mother sang for me to dance, when my father took my hand to keep me safe – but it was such a small, plain thing that I mistook it for something ordinary and failed to see. We expect our happiness to come with a sign and bells, but it doesn’t.”
“Sometimes you can love something not because you instinctively connect with it but because another person does, and keeping their things in your heart takes you back to them.”
“We write ourselves certain parts and then keep playing them as if we have no choice. But a tardy person can become a punctual one, if she chooses. You don’t have to keep being the thing you have become. It is never too late.”
“I found out what was right only by getting it wrong.”
“Things don't so much end as disappear. They don't so much begin as turn up. You think there will be a time to say goodbye, but people have often gone before you know about it. And I don't just mean the dying.”
“Queenie Hennessy - "I am here to die." Sister Mary Inconnue - "Pardon me but you are here to live until you die. There is a significant difference.”
“Sometimes you cannot clear the past completely. You must live alongside your sorrow.”
“Waiting is about being still. You can’t keep busy every minute, otherwise you’re not waiting. You’re just throwing things around to distract yourself.”
“Sometimes, Harold, the way forward takes you by surprise. You try to force something in the familiar direction and discover that what it needs is to move in a different dimension. The way forward is not forward, but off to one side, in a place you have not noticed before.”
“So you see, people are rarely the straightforward things we think they are. Even the villains in a story can turn round and surprise us.”
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Book Keywords:
regret, past, death, love, hospice, goodbye, dying, pilgrimage, sorrow































