Harriet Lane Quotes & Sayings

I've thought about the pictures often; what they show or, more accurately, don't show. Remembering what was happening elsewhere: in the distance, or behind the camera, off to one side. — Harriet Lane

I'm already someone else, but the person I turn into at these low points is someone I never imagined I could be a few years ago: someone with a hot knot of fury where her heart used to be. — Harriet Lane

I once heard someone on the radio saying that a bee is never more than forty minutes away from starving to death, and this fact has stayed with me because it seems to have a certain personal resonance. My children are in a perpetual proximity to catastrophe: concussion, dehydration, drowning or sunstroke. Keeping them safe requires constant vigilance.

I've turned into one of those mothers, full of terror. — Harriet Lane

Little by little, the city falls away, like something giving up... — Harriet Lane

Over time, I've come to see that so much of a personality boils down to confidence: whether you have it, or not. — Harriet Lane

The house fills with the particular atmosphere that accompanies peacefully sleeping children: a rich narcotic silence that creeps down the stairs and twines itself around the table legs. — Harriet Lane

All this talk about "finding yourself"; often, other people show you yourself first. — Harriet Lane

I know the names of the books - their old covers bleached to palest greens or pinks by the endless cycle of summers - lined up on the shelf. — Harriet Lane

I turn my back and look out to sea, the sun so low and molten that my eyes fill with tears, and yet I can feel it: a cooler wind is coming in, the edge of evening approaching. Dusk is gathering along the coast, in the coves and quaysides and marinas, where in an hour or so the long strings of coloured bulbs will twinkle and sway; and then it will pass over us-like a visitation: a plague or a blessing.... — Harriet Lane

I found the final plot twist unsatisfying, as plot twists often are: nothing like life, which - it seems to me - turns less on shocks or theatrics than on the small quiet moments, misunderstandings, or disappointments, the things that it's easy to overlook. — Harriet Lane

Maybe it's not really lying if you barely know you're doing it. It should be true. It's the way it should be, in an ideal world. — Harriet Lane

Emma is the engine of this home, the person who propels it forward, keeps everyone fed and clothed and healthy and happy - and yet she's entirely alone within it, and getting lonelier with every item ticked off her checklist. This is what it comes down to: the flat-out invisible drudgery of family maintenance, the vanishing of personality as everyone else's accrues. — Harriet Lane

At the edge, I start to imagine the thing that isn't being directly looked at, the vague presence of something: a house, a wall, a hedgerow. Your eyes will slip beyond this, into the bleached air, but you should know it's there, and eventually your attention will come back to it. That's how I want it to work, anyway. — Harriet Lane