December 2017.
The Library at the Edge of the World
by Felicity Hayes-McCoy
(New York, Harper Perennial, 2017)
For millennia, written words had conveyed dreams, visions, and aspirations across oceans and mountains, and as she steered between puddles and potholes she was part of a process that stretched across distance and time, linking handwritten texts from Egypt and Mesopotamia with the plastic-covered novels, CDs, and celebrity cookbooks lined up in the back of her van.
Page 2.
Choosing three fifteen had made it sound as if her own time were so important that she measured it in quarter-hour slots.
Page 17.
He had been raised to assume that he had a God-given right to whatever he wanted, and his instinct was to manipulate everyone and everything around him in order to get it.
Page 28.
Lying back again with the warmth of the sun on her eyelids, she smiled at the small ironies of life.
Page 43.
In fact, far from being an arbitrary whim, it had felt lie the fulfillment of a process.
Page 55.
The freedom of growing up without constant adult supervision was one of the things that, in hindsight, she valued most about her childhood.
Page 76.
It had only been a few minutes spent with an acquaintance but the human contact and the prospect of a couple of books to read and chat about had obviously made her day.
Page 78.
It was a reprehensible habit, of course, but people did leave the most interesting things in library books. Strands of wool, holy pictures, blades of grass, even bank notes. And ephemera like that flier for the art exhibition that had changed the course of her own life.
Page 125.
To grow up in a rural town that had all the pretensions and none of the sophistication of a city and then choose to settle down there seemed bizarre.
Page 134.
Trying to photograph the transcendental moment when the blazing disk disappeared into the ocean was ridiculous; in staring through a lens, the eye lost its peripheral vision while the scents and sounds that were part of the experience of a sunset were lost in the attempt to capture it.
Page 136.
Unless you lived in a box, your happiness depended largely on other people; so if happiness mattered more to you than anything else, your life, whether or not you realized it, was largely in other people’s hands.
Page 142.
He would be long dead before the effect would show. But sure that didn’t bother him. In fact it was half the pleasure of creating. It.
Page 199.
He believed in acting in accordance with the laws of common sense, and, above all, he hated waste.
Page 200.
What was the point in trying to help someone who refused to be helped?
Page 204.
“Seventy years I’ve spent inside in that convent and I’ve learned nothing more in there than \i learned on my father’s farm. Everything in life has its own time to happen. A time to plant, a time to grow, and a time to harvest. And if you take things steady you’ll bring your harvest home.”
Page 226.
Half the fun of a library was stumbling on treasures by chance.
Page 230.
Reading the same books that your friends read gave you a sense of belonging.
Page 245.
Half his crankiness was down tot Pt’s failure to manage him. … If you didn’t put manner on him from the outset … you’d get no good out of a man.
Page 266.
She realized that telling the truth at this state would actually be an effective way to support her ongoing lies.
Page 275.
“It all sounds faintly ridiculous when you say it out loud, doesn’t it? I don’t mean death or divorce, or even betrayal. I mean how one’s reacted.”
Page 279.
Wasn’t it weird … how, if everyone pulled together you felt you could take on the world?
Page 293.
She didn’t want a conversation, she just wanted to close her eyes and escape from everything.
Page 332.
None of the furniture or possessions that surrounded her were symbols of hard-won independence. They were the story of her reintegration into a community that, for years, she had failed to value and that now might be her salvation.
Page 335.
The taste of windblown salt on her lips was mixed with the honey scent of flowers.
Page 340.