“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”
“The most important thing in life, and you can’t tell whether people have it or not. Surely this is wrong? Surely people who are happy should look happy, at all times, no matter how much money they have or how uncomfortable their shoes are or how little their child is sleeping; and people who are doing OK but have still not found their soul-mate should look, I don’t know, anxious, like Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally; and people who are desperate should wear something, a yellow ribbon maybe, which would allow them to be identified by similar desperate people. ”
“Look at all the things that can go wrong for men. There’s the nothing-happening-at-all problem, the too-much-happening-too-soon problem, the dismal-droop-after-a-promising-beginning problem; there’s the size-doesn’t-matter-except-in-my-case problem, the failing-to-deliver-the-goods problem…and what do women have to worry about? A handful of cellulite? Join the club. A spot of I-wonder-how-I-rank? ”
“He had wandered through the streets for hours, neither knowing nor caring where he was going. All he knew was that he couldn’t return to the empty rooms of the house, couldn’t look at the things they had touched and held and known with him.”
“The only things I regret, and the only things I’ll ever regret are things I didn’t do. In the end, that’s what we mourn. The paths we didn’t take. The people we didn’t touch.”
Glenda writes with such gentleness, with intricate attention to the things that really matter, and captures wisps of beauty from the world and its inhabitants, weaves them into a warm tapestry and lays this on the page with such a feather touch. When I first read this book, I just sobbed and sobbed. The sadness is as beautiful as the happiness and hope.
“Treehorn liked cereal for breakfast. But mostly he liked cereal boxes. He always read every single thing on the cereal box while he was eating breakfast. And he always sent in for the things the cereal box said he could send for.”
“In his small house at the other side of the wood, Mr. Tickle was asleep.
You didn’t know that there was such a thing as a Tickle, did you?
Well, there is!”
“From somewhere quite near he heard a muffled ‘Grrrrr,’ followed by, ‘Did somebody say something?’ Little Bear moved a few things aside and there, propped up against a cardboard box and covered in dust, was Old Bear.”
“A truck brought furniture, a television set, a radio, rugs, pictures, a stove and lots of other things. The house was ready for the new family. At last the new family has arrived! Look! It is Stitches, the tailor! Stitches paid the workmen for building the house.”
“Things went bad for a while. The accounting practice he’d had been with for years folded suddenly. Then Dad joined with a friend, Alec Cowan, to start their own consultancy.”
″ ‘I neither believe in ghosts nor feel uneasy,’ he replied. ‘I never saw a ghost myself, and I never met with any one who had; and I have generally found that strange and unaccountable things have almost always been accounted for, and found to be quite simple, on close examination.’ ”