Quotes from recently read books

The following are quotes from books I've recently read.  All but the first seem to state a sentiment similar to Sam Gamgee's in Tolkien's Return of the King when he sat in Mordor, the darkest place in Middle Earth, looked up at the sky and for just a moment saw that the stars were still there hidden behind the clouds and smog as they always would be.


She was wearing a cheery sun-yellow cardigan over over a brown dress and clutching an umbrella with both hands in an attitude of polite anxiety.  Sometimes, thought the actress inside Laurel ("ears, eyes, and heart, all at once"), you could tell everything there was to know about a person by a single gesture.  The woman with the umbrella was nervous, dependable and grateful.

from The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton

[Remarkable...] that the whole world can be involved in this madness we call war, and all the while the flowers and the bees and the seasons keep on doing what they must, wise but never weary in their wait for humanity to come to its senses and remember the beauty of life? [...] it's wonderous, don't you think, that a person can swing from despair to gleeful hunger, and that even during the dark days there is happiness to be found in the smallest things?

-- Vivien, The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton


And the stars: the sky gets crowded at night, and it is a bit like watching a clock seeing the constellations slide across the sky.  It's comforting to know that they'll show up, however crook things get.  That used to help in France [participating in WWI].  It put things into perspective -- the stars had been around since before there were people.  They just kept shining no matter what was going on.

-- Tom, The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman


He traced the constellations as they slid their way across the roof of the world from dusk till dawn.  The precision of it, the quiet orderliness of the stars, gave him a sense of freedom.  There was nothing he was going through that the stars had not seen before, somewhere, some time on this earth.  Given enough time, their memory would close over his life like healing a wound.  All would be forgotten, all suffering erased.

from The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman