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Book: Year of Wonders
Quotes of Book: Year of Wonders
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  1. Geraldine Brooks _ Year of Wonders

    Let's go then," I whispered. "Let's go and live, since we have no choice in it.
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  2. Geraldine Brooks _ Year of Wonders

    How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst. It is not as if, had you asked me, I would have claimed to fathom the thoughts and sentiments of two whose station in life was so far distant from mine. But in my own unexamined way I had believed that, working in their house and seeing to their needs, watching their comings and goings and their dealings with others, I had come to know them. How little, how very little, that knowledge had really amounted to.
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  3. Geraldine Brooks _ Year of Wonders

    The cottage was set hard into the side of the hill, crouching before the winter winds that roared across the moors. It announced itself by smell long before you could catch sight of it. Sometimes sickly sweet, sometimes astringent, the scents of herbal brews and cordials wafted powerfully from the precincts of the little home.
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  4. Geraldine Brooks _ Year of Wonders

    My Tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint. Because they have been such a little time with us, they seem to hold to life but weakly.
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  5. Geraldine Brooks _ Year of Wonders

    How do we tumble down a hill? A foot placed incautiously on an unsteady rock or loosened turf, an ankle twisted or a knee buckled, and of a sudden we are gone, our body lost to our own control until we find ourselves sprawled in indignity at the bottom. ... For sin, too, must always start with but a single misstep, and suddenly we are hurtling toward some uncertain stopping point. All that is sure in the descent is that we will arrive sullied and bruised and unable to regain our former place without hard effort.
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  6. Geraldine Brooks _ Year of Wonders

    He instructed me how futile it is to wallow in regret for that which cannot be changed and how atonement might be made for even the gravest sins.
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  7. Geraldine Brooks _ Year of Wonders

    She closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them and gazed at me. 'I wonder if you know how you have changed. It is the one good, perhaps, to come out of this terrible year. Oh, the spark was clear in you when you first came to me - but you covered your light as if you were afraid of what would happen if anybody saw it. You were like a flame blown by the wind until it is almost extinguished. All I had to do was put the glass around you. And now, how you shine!"
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  8. Geraldine Brooks _ Year of Wonders

    Somehow, the telling of all this rinsed my mind clean and left me able to think clearly once more. By gathering and sorting my own feelings so, I was finally able to fashion a scale on which I could weigh my father's nature and find a balance between my disgust for him and an understanding of him; my guilt in the matter of his death against the debt he owed me for the manner of my life. At the finish of it, I felt free of him, and I was able to think calmly once more. Elinor
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  9. Geraldine Brooks _ Year of Wonders

    And now I tell you this: do not dwell any more on things in the past that you cannot change. Who made man frail of the flesh? Who made our lusts, our low ways and our high? Did not God? Is not He the author of it all? The appetites we have all come from Him; they have been with us since Eden. If we slip and fall, He understands our weakness. Did not mighty King David lust, and was he not driven through his lust to do great wrong? And yet God loved David, and gave us, through him, the glory of the Psalms. So, too,
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  10. Geraldine Brooks _ Year of Wonders

    Anys was so skilled with plants and balms that she knew how to extract their fragrant oils, and these she wore on her person so that a light, pleasant scent, like summer fruits and flowers, always preceded her."
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  11. Geraldine Brooks _ Year of Wonders

    I cannot say that I have faith anymore. Hope, perhaps. We have agreed that it will do for now.
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  12. Geraldine Brooks _ Year of Wonders

    This is how an owl must look to a mouse in that last second before the talons sink into the flesh.
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