Cold Enough for Snow
Jessica Au
Top 10 Best Quotes
“we were all essentially nothing, just series of sensations and desires, none of it lasting.”
“Maybe it's good, I said, to stop sometimes and reflect upon the things that have happened, maybe thinking about sadness can actually end up making you happy." (9)”
“As we walked, she asked me about my work. I didn't answer at first, and then I said that in many old paintings, one could discover what was called a pentimento, an earlier layer of something that the artist had chosen to paint over. Sometimes, these were as small as an object, or a color that had been changed, but other times, they could be as significant as a whole figure, an animal, or a piece of furniture. I said that in this way too, writing was just like a painting. It was the only way that one could go back and change the past, to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been, or rather as we saw it. I said, for this reason, it was better for her not to trust anything she read.”
“She made no attempt to hide her grief, which must have been her father’s grief also, and this surprised me, that she would not try and mask it somehow, that she was not ashamed of the drama, as my family would have been, but inhabit it with rage and sadness, as if it were the cloak of some great animal that she had just slain.”
“Maybe it’s good, I said, to stop sometimes and reflect upon the things that have happened, maybe thinking about sadness can actually end up making you happy.”
“it was impossible, ultimately, to compare one life to another, and we always ended up essentially in the same place where we had begun.”
“Then she reached for her bag and took out a small book. She explained she had found it at a store near her home, and that it described the nature of your character based on the date of your birth. (...) I thought some of it was true and some of it was not, but the real truth was how such things allowed someone to talk about you, or what you had done or why you did it, in a way that unraveled your character into distinct traits. It made you seem readable to them, or to yourself, which could feel like a revelation.”
“She had kept, I knew, all the tickets, brochures and guides we had been given to take home, as if she would take them out later to read as one reads a novel.”
“Nowadays, she said, people were hungry to know everything, thinking that they could understand it all, as if enlightenment were just around the corner. But, she said, in fact there was no control, and understanding would not lessen any pain. The best we could do in this life was to pass through it, like smoke through the branches, suffering, until we either reached a state of nothingness, or else suffered elsewhere.”
“Laurie and I read till take, and when I finally fell asleep, I sensed that Laurie was no longer reading, but looking at me as one is able to look upon a person one knows well, fully, and without reserve." (75)”
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Book Keywords:
writing, travel, letting-go, pentimento, astrology, painting, understanding, horoscopes, mother, life, suffering, the-past
