Kim Edwards Quotes & Sayings

The place was a familiar as breath but as far from his life now as the moon. — Kim Edwards

She seemed not to worry very much about ghings, but rather to accept the world as a fascinating and unusual place where anything might happen
memory keepers daugher — Kim Edwards

We all have secrets. We've all kept secrets. We've had secrets kept from us, and we know how that feels. — Kim Edwards

As a writer and as a reader, I really believe in the power of narrative to allow us ways to experience life beyond our own, ways to reflect on things that have happened to us and a chance to engage with the world in ways that transcend time and gender and all sorts of things. — Kim Edwards

Though my stories aren't autobiographical, I do sometimes use things from my life. — Kim Edwards

I have found that if you love your life ..
Life will love you back .! — Kim Edwards

He had handed his daughter to Caroline Gill and that act had led him here, years later, to this girl in motion of her own, this girl who had decided yes, a brief moment of release in the back of a car, in the room of a silent house, this girl who had stood up later, adjusting her clothes, with now knowledge of how that moment was already shaping her life. — Kim Edwards

...her tone more disapproving than dismayed. — Kim Edwards

What would happen, they conjectured, if they simply went on assuming their children would do everything. Perhaps not quickly. Perhaps not by the book. But what if they simply erased those growth and development charts, with their precise, constricting points and curves? What if they kept their expectations but erased the time line? What harm could it do? Why not try? — Kim Edwards

I swam across Skaneateles Lake, about a mile, when I was 11 years old. I remember feeling when I was in the middle of the lake that I would be there forever, and having no idea where on shore I'd end up. I made it, and I'm proud of the determination and persistence that took. — Kim Edwards

No one could suspect the intricate mysteries of her heart. — Kim Edwards

That there were other worlds, invisible, unknown, beyond imagination even, was a revelation to him. — Kim Edwards

You don't know when you are immersed in a book what the reaction to it will be, but I feel great about 'The Lake of Dreams.' — Kim Edwards

There was so much force and beauty in the windows, such unsettled sadness in what little I knew of Rose's life, all her longing, her distance from her daughter. Just knowing she had existed opened new and uneasy possibilities within my understanding of the story I'd always thought I'd known by heart ... Whoever Rose had been, she was gone, unable to speak for herself, fading into the past as surely as these rainy colors were diffusing, even now [p. 142]. — Kim Edwards

Lately, the world felt fragile, like a blown egg, as if it might shatter beneath a careless touch. — Kim Edwards

You don't want to engage in road rage when the person in the next car might be your child's future teacher or your dentist's father. — Kim Edwards

I lived for two years in Odawara, a castle town an hour outside of Tokyo, near the sea. It's a beautiful place, and I drew on my experiences there when writing 'The Lake of Dreams.' — Kim Edwards

The challenges in this place are real and sometimes very difficult, but I've learned to slow down and look for beauty in my days, for the mysteries and blessings woven into everything, into the very words we speak. — Kim Edwards

I don't see how sucking the joy out of every aspect of life can be pleasing to anybody's God — Kim Edwards

Dinosaurs drank this water, did you know that? Water moves forever in a circle; someday, little ones, your grandchildren may even drink your tears. — Kim Edwards

Sometimes loneliness is an emergency situation — Kim Edwards

He wished he had some kind of X-ray vision for the human heart. — Kim Edwards

You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy. — Kim Edwards

All that sunny afternoon, traveling north and east, Caroline believed absolutely in the future. And why not? For if the worst had already happened to them in the eyes of the world, then surely, surely, it was the worst that they left behind them now. — Kim Edwards

After all these years, I feel so free. Who knows where I might fly? — Kim Edwards

It shocked me, the strength of the image, the desire I had to see if it might happen this way- though I couldn't tell if it was really desire in the present or leftover from the past. — Kim Edwards

Your understanding of a place changes the longer you stay; you discover more, and your own life gets woven into the fabric of the community. — Kim Edwards

Music is like you touch the pulse of the world. Music is always happening, and sometimes you get to touch it for a while, and when you do you know that everything's connetcted to everything else. — Kim Edwards

Grief, it seemed, was a physical place. — Kim Edwards

'The Lake of Dreams' grew gradually, over many years, elements and ideas accruing until they gained enough critical mass to become a novel. — Kim Edwards

I find my husband's family history fascinating, as they can trace the family lineage back to ancestors who fought, and died, in the first battle of the Revolution, as well as to many other interesting people. — Kim Edwards

Think of it, Dad. What if I have it in me to do that, and I don't try? — Kim Edwards

He'd kept this silence because his own secrets were darker, more hidden, and because he believed that his secrets had created hers. — Kim Edwards

So something had begun, and now she could not stop it. Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement. She could leave this place today. She could start a new life somewhere else. — Kim Edwards

She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight. — Kim Edwards

I always talk to my students about the need to write for the joy of writing. I try to sort of disaggregate the acclaim from the act of writing. — Kim Edwards

There was in the mountains, and perhaps in the world at large, a theory of compensation that held that for everything given something else was immediately and visibly lost. "Well, you've got the smarts even if your cousin did get the looks." Compliments, seductive as flowers, thorny with their opposites: "Yes, you may be smart but you sure are ugly; You may look nice but you didn't get a brain." Compensation; balance in the universe. — Kim Edwards

Once, this whole world had been hidden beneath a shallow sea. — Kim Edwards

She saw herself moving through another life, an exotic, difficult, satisfying life. — Kim Edwards

The thing is, I used to like that: feeling special because I knew something no one else did. It's a kind of power, isn't it, knowing a secret? But lately I don't like it so much, knowing this. It's not really mine to know, is it? — Kim Edwards

It's kind of a mysterious process, but something will catch my attention, and I'll make a note about it. I may even write a few pages about it, and then I'll put it aside, but I'll sort of keep it in mind. Then as time goes on, other things will gather to it as if it's a magnet, almost, and eventually, there's enough to make the story. — Kim Edwards

He liked that bones were solid things, surviving even the white heat of cremation. Bones would last; it was easy for him to put his faith in something so solid and predictable. — Kim Edwards

You can't stop time. You can't capture light. You can only turn your face up and let it rain down. — Kim Edwards

I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it. — Kim Edwards

In writing, I want to be remembered for telling good stories in beautiful and powerful language, using the poetry of words to reflect the thematic concerns of compelling stories. — Kim Edwards

It wasn't right. He knew that, but it was like falling: once you started you couldn't stop until something stopped you. — Kim Edwards

Her voice, high and clear, moved through the leaves, through the sunlight. It splashed onto the gravel, the grass. He imagined the notes falling into the air like stones into water, rippling the invisible surface of the world. Waves of sound, waves of light: his father had tried to pin everything down, but the world was fluid and could not be contained. — Kim Edwards

He had never even glimpsed her. — Kim Edwards

This is what he knew that Paul didn't: the world was precarious and sometimes cruel. He'd had to fight hard to achieve what Paul simply took for granted. — Kim Edwards

The secret at the heart of 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' is something everybody, except for some of the characters, knows in Chapter 1. Some of the narrative tension comes from that distance between what the readers know and what the characters know. — Kim Edwards

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me. — Kim Edwards

And the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood. — Kim Edwards

dirt, but the machine began to make — Kim Edwards

It's my fault too. For a long time, I wanted to be rescued, I realized that. But not anymore. You don't have to protect me all the time now. — Kim Edwards

She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love
nothing, now, but bones. — Kim Edwards

Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement. — Kim Edwards

Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell. — Kim Edwards

After 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' it took me a few months to shut out the world. I really had to turn off the Internet and sort of cloister myself away from the world again and sink into that psychic space to write again. — Kim Edwards

On an impulse he went into the room and stood before the window, pushing aside the sheer curtain to watch the snow, now nearly eight inches high on the lampposts and the fences and the roofs. It was the sort of storm that rarely happened in Lexington, and the steady white flakes, the silence, filled him with a sense of excitement and peace. It was a moment when all the disparate shards of his life seemed to knit themselves together, every past sadness and disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty hidden now beneath the soft white layers. Tomorrow would be quiet, the world subdued and fragile, until the neighborhood children came out to break the stillness with their tracks and shouts and joy. He remembered such days from his own childhood in the mountains, rare moments of escape when he went into the woods, his breathing amplified and his voice somehow muffled by the heavy snow that bent branches low, drifted over paths. The world, for a few short hours, transformed. — Kim Edwards

You hold me at arm's length. — Kim Edwards

I just couldn't do it- break all the rules. Blow everything up."
"The world doesn't end," Bree said quietly. "Amazing, but it really doesn't. — Kim Edwards

They can learn- they must learn- to appreciate the history of their good fortune through the experiences of those who not only witnessed history, but made it. — Kim Edwards

His love for her was so deeply woven with resentment that he could not untangle the two. — Kim Edwards

Short on money, long on hope — Kim Edwards

The year was 1922, and the Curies had transformed plain earth into something rare and unimagined. A secret of the universe has been revealed, and a restless world dreamed of transformation. [p. 205] — Kim Edwards

One of my greatest times of inspiration is when I'm traveling or living in a new country - there's a tremendous freedom that comes from being unfettered by your own, familiar culture, and by seeing the world from a different point of view. — Kim Edwards

We have a choice. To be bitter and angry, or to try and move on. It's the hardest thing for me, letting go of all that righteous anger. I'm still struggling. But that's what I want to do. — Kim Edwards

I think that it would be hard to find a family that didn't have a secret in it somewhere, and sometimes we know about them, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we have an inkling that there's something hidden, but I think that it touches everybody's life. — Kim Edwards

All day she had been dreaming of the comet, its wild and fiery beauty, what it might mean, how her life might change. — Kim Edwards

For this is what I have learned, in my short life: do not act out of anger. Act from love or not at all. I have seen it, how anger makes a space for what I must call evil. — Kim Edwards

My first job was in a nursing home - a terrible place in retrospect. It was in an old house, and the residents were so lonely. People rarely visited them. I only stayed there a couple of months, but it made a strong impression on me. — Kim Edwards

This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good. — Kim Edwards

He carried Paul inside and up the stairs. He gave him a drink of water and the orange chewable aspirin he like and sat with him on the bed, holding his hand ... This was what he yearned to capture on film: these rare moments where the world seemed unified, coherent, everything contained in a single fleeting image. A spareness that held beauty and hope and motion - a kind of silvery poetry, just as the body was poetry in blood and flesh and bone. — Kim Edwards

It's impossible to control the reception of your work - the only thing you can control is the experience of writing itself, and the work you create. — Kim Edwards

I think that the whole child welfare system has to be totally taken apart and built up again. Have an agency just specifically for those follow-up cases. — Kim Edwards

A fear Paul had transformed all these years, like a gifted alchemist, into anger and rebellion. — Kim Edwards

I hadn't really thought about this until 'The Lake of Dreams,' but I've set all my stories in places that are familiar to me. It frees me up to spend more imaginative time on the characters. — Kim Edwards

Some dreams matter, illuminate a crucial choice or reveal some intuition that's trying to push its way to the surface. Other, though, are detritus, the residue of the day reassembling itself in some disjointed and chaotic way ... Frantic dreams, they left me tired, and I woke grouchy to another rainy day, the sky so densely gray and the rain so thick that I couldn't that I couldn't see the opposite shore [p, 166] — Kim Edwards

'Middlesex' by Jeffrey Eugenides left me both moved and, at times, laughing out loud in delight. — Kim Edwards

So young, so lonely and naive, that she imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasn't like that. The love was within her all the time and its only renewal came from giving it away. — Kim Edwards

He could hardly imagine anymore what his life would be without the weight of his hidden knowledge. He'd come to think of it as a kind of penance. It was self-destructive, he could see that, but that was the way things were. People smoked, they jumped out of airplanes, they drank too much and got into their cars and drove without seat belts. — Kim Edwards

A moment might be a thousand different things. — Kim Edwards

Paul, careening down the slide with his arms out flung, and Phoebe, present somehow through her absence. — Kim Edwards

You can't spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won't work. You'll just end up missing the life you have. — Kim Edwards

Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience. — Kim Edwards

I like to think I've grown as a writer and taken some risks, but I still consider myself to be a literary writer. — Kim Edwards

Either things grow and change or they die. — Kim Edwards

The way we behave, our views and outlooks really have their sources some place. They come from somewhere. Sometimes we don't even know what they are, and yet they're very powerful in our lives. — Kim Edwards

I grew up in Skaneateles, a small town in New York's Finger Lakes region, where parts of my family have lived for five generations. I can walk the streets there and point out my father's childhood home, the houses my grandfather built, the farm where my great-great-uncle worked after he emigrated from England in the 1880s. — Kim Edwards

I haven't done any genealogical exploring myself, though members of my family and also of my husband's family have traced things back. I have a great grandfather on my mother's side who was a musician, and I'd like to know more about his life. — Kim Edwards

A vase full of flowers: dark red and pale pink in a cloud of baby's breath. — Kim Edwards

Rows and rows of books lined the shelves and I let my eyes linger on the sturdy spines, thinking how human books were, so full of ideas and images, worlds imagined, worlds perceived; full of fingerprints and sudden laughter and the sighs of readers, too. It was humbling to consider all these authors, struggling with this word or that phrase, recording their thoughts for people they'd never meet. In that same way, the detritus of the boxes was humbling - receipts, jotted notes, photos with no inscriptions, all of it once held together by the fabric of lives now finished, gone. — Kim Edwards

His discomfort seemed to soften her, for when he met her eyes again, they were kind. — Kim Edwards

...bleak territory of the heart. — Kim Edwards

Away from the bright motion of the party, she carried her sadness like a dark stone clenched in her palm. — Kim Edwards

Why did she [Madame Curie] seek to tame this mystery, which in the hands of others turned a multitude to ashes? Her work exploded with the violence of a thousand suns, but I must tell her that it was not her fault, the way they twisted her creation, tampered with her dreams.
"I will tell her.
"They said she was inhuman, heartless, but it is not so. She is here now. Weeping, she awaits me, She is carrying balm for our hands. [p, 56] — Kim Edwards

I've always set my stories in places I know well. It frees me up to spend more imaginative time on the characters if I'm not worrying about the logistics. — Kim Edwards

Norah watched him, serious and utterly absorbed in his task, overcome by the simple fact of his existence. — Kim Edwards

A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how. — Kim Edwards

There was a sense that there was a lot of word of mouth happening with 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter,' even in hardcover. — Kim Edwards