Helen Simonson Quotes

The world is full of small ignorances. We must all do our best to ignore them and thereby keep them small, don't you think

— Helen Simonson

“Only sometimes when we pick and choose among the rules we discover later that we have set aside something precious in the process.”

— Helen Simonson

I tell myself it does not matter what one reads
favorite authors, particular themes
as long as we read something. It is not even important to own the books.

— Helen Simonson

“He opened his mouth to say that she looked extremely beautiful and deserved armfuls of roses, but the words were lost in committee somewhere, shuffled aside by the parts of his head that worked full-time at avoiding ridicule.”

— Helen Simonson

“You are not the first man to miss a woman's more subtle communication ... They think they are waving when we see only the calm sea, and pretty soon everybody drowns.”

— Helen Simonson

“But it's not enough to be in love. It's about how you spend your days, what you do together, who you choose as friends, and most of all it's what work you do ... Better to break both our hearts now than watch them wither away over time.”

— Helen Simonson

“Oh, it's simple pragmatism, Dad. It's called the real world. If we refused to do business with the morally questionable, the deal volume would drop in half and the good guys like us would end up poor. Then where would we all be?" said Roger. "On a nice dry spit of land know as the moral high ground?" suggested the Major.”

— Helen Simonson

Unlike you, who must do a cost-benefit analysis of every human interaction," he said, "I have no idea what I hope to accomplish. I only know that I must try to see her. That's what love is about, Roger. It's when a woman drives all lucid thought from your head; when you are unable to contrive romantic stratagems, and the usual manipulations fail you; when all your carefully laid plans have no meaning and all you can do is stand mute in her presence. You hope she takes pity on you and drops a few words of kindness into the vacuum of your mind.

— Helen Simonson

“Men these days expect their wives to be as dazzling as their mistresses."
That's shocking," said the Major. "How on earth will they tell them apart?”

— Helen Simonson

“As I get older, I find myself insisting on my right to be philosophically sloppy.”

— Helen Simonson

“I don't believe the greatest views in the world are great because they are vast or exotic,' she said. 'I think their power comes from the knowledge that they do not change. You look at them and you know they have been the same for a thousand years.”

— Helen Simonson

“I know something of shame [ ... ] How can we not all feel it? We are all small-minded people, creeping about the earth grubbing for our own advantage and making the very mistakes for which we want to humiliate our neighbors. [ ... ] I think we wake up every day with high intentions and by dusk we have routinely fallen short. Sometimes I think God created the darkness just so he didn't have to look at us all the time.”

— Helen Simonson

“I am to be converted to the joys of knitting,' said Mrs. Ali, smiling at the Major.
'My condolences,' he said.”

— Helen Simonson

“America wielded her huge power in the world with a brash confidence that reminded him of a toddler who has got hold of a hammer.”

— Helen Simonson

“We are all small-minded people, creeping about the earth grubbing for our own advantage and making the very mistakes for which we want to humiliate our neighbors.”

— Helen Simonson

“I miss being a student," said Abdul Wahid. "I miss the passionate discussions with my friends, and most of all the hours among the books.”

— Helen Simonson

“Look here, it's all very tidy and convenient to see the world in black and white ... It's a particular passion of young men eager to sweep away their dusty elders. However, philosophical rigidity is usually combined with a complete lack of education or real-world experience, and it is often augmented with strange haircuts and an aversion to bathing.”

— Helen Simonson

“My dear Mrs. Ali, I would hardly refer to you as old," he said. "You are in what I would call the very prime flowering of mature womanhood." It was a little grandiose but he hoped to surprise a blush. Instead she laughed out loud at him. "I have never heard anyone try to trowel such a thick layer of flattery on the wrinkles and fat deposits of advanced middle age, Major," she said. "I am fifty-eight years old and I think I have slipped beyond flowering. I can only hope now to dry out into one of those everlasting bouquets.”

— Helen Simonson

“They sat a moment in embrace of silent mutual comfort, which was, she often thought, the reward of those long married.”

— Helen Simonson

“It's so much easier to tell other people how to do their job than fix one's own shortcoming, isn't it?”

— Helen Simonson

“He had always assumed gossip to be the malicious whispering of uncomfortable truths not the fabrication of absurdities. How was one to protect oneself against people making up things Was a life of careful impeccable behavior not enough in a world where inventions were passed around as fact”

— Helen Simonson

Youth's lost companion may be the measured friend of old age, I hope", said Daniel. "I may write a poem on the subject."
"Dear God, it sounds more like a cross-stitched pillow than a poem," said Hugh.

— Helen Simonson

“She looked at him and he read in her eyes a disappointment that he should have stooped to the dead relative excuse. Yet he was as entitled as the next man to use it. People did it all the time; it was understood that there was a defined window of availability beginning a decent few days after a funeral and continuing for no more than a couple of months. Of course, some people took dreadful advantage and a year later were still hauling around their dead relatives on their backs, showing them off to explain late tax payments and missed dentist appointments: something he would never do.”

— Helen Simonson

“Despite his attempts to maintain a vigorous structure of errands, golf games, visits, and meetings, there were sometimes days like this one, filled with rain and touched with a gnawing sense of parts missing from life. When the slick mud ran in the flower beds and the clouds smothered the light, he missed his wife.”

— Helen Simonson

“He envisaged her in the heaven he had learned about in childhood: a grassy place with blue sky and a light breeze. He could no longer picture the inhabitants with anything as ridiculous as wings. Instead he saw Nancy strolling in a simple sheath dress, her low shoes held in her hand and a shady tree beckoning her in the distance. The rest of the time, he could not hold on to this vision and she was only gone, like Bertie, and he was left to struggle on alone in the awful empty space of unbelief.”

— Helen Simonson

“At our age, surely there are better things to sustain us, to sustain a marriage, than the brief flame of passion?" ... "You are mistaken, Ernest," she said at last. "There is only the passionate spark. Without it, two people living together may be lonelier than if they lived quite alone.”

— Helen Simonson

“Ah yes, the dreaded one-way system ... He and Nancy had laughed later, imagining Dante redesigning Purgatory into a one-way system offering occasional glimpses of St. Peter and the pearly gates over two separate sets of dividing concrete barriers.”

— Helen Simonson

“There is often an inverse correlation between genius and personal hygiene.”

— Helen Simonson

“He liked the clover, evidence of the country always pressing in close, quietly sabotaging anyone who tried to manicure nature into suburban submission.”

— Helen Simonson

“It also occurred to him that perhaps this only meant that the less he saw of people, the more kindly he felt toward them, and that this might explain his current mild exasperation with his many condolence-offering acquaintances.”

— Helen Simonson

“The Major wished young men wouldn't think so much. It always seemed to result in absurd revolutionary movements or, as in the case of several of his former pupils, the production of very bad poetry.”

— Helen Simonson

“It was frustratingly common that children were no sooner gone from the nest and established in their own homes ... than they began to infantilize their own parents and wish them dead, or at least in assisted living.”

— Helen Simonson

But if all else fails, I can always write her a sonnet." "A sonnet?" said Hugh. "No woman can resist having her name rhymed with a flower in iambic pentameter," said Daniel.

— Helen Simonson

“He was struck by the thought that he was often lonely, even in the midst of many friends.”

— Helen Simonson

Oh, you're American,' said Mrs. Khan, holding out her hand. 'What a charming costume.'
'The Bengal Lancers were apparently a famous Anglo-Indian regiment,' said the young man. He pulled at his thighs to display the full ballooning of the white jodhpurs. 'Though how the Brits conquered the empire wearing clown pants is beyond me.'
'From the nation that conquered the West wearing leather chaps and hats made of dead squirrel,' said the Major.

— Helen Simonson

“While the lake lapped at their feet and the mountains absorbed their calls and the sky flung its blue parachute over their heads, he thought how wonderful it was that life was, after all, more simple than he had ever imagined.”

— Helen Simonson

“Do you really know what it means to be in love with an unsuitable woman?" "Is there any other kind?”

— Helen Simonson

“You Anglo-Saxons have largely broken away from such dependence on family. Each generation feels perfectly free to act alone and you are not afraid.”

— Helen Simonson

“It was never a good idea to confide in people. They always remembered, and when they came up to you in the street, years later, you could see the information was still firmly attached to your face and present in the way they said your name and the pressure of their hand clasping yours.”

— Helen Simonson

“Her favourite summer memories were not of events themselves, of picnics, sea bathing, tennis afternoons and cricket matches, but of watching Hugh and Daniel enjoying them and locking into memory the delight in their faces and their open laughter.”

— Helen Simonson

“Memories were like tomb paintings, thought the Major, the colors still vivid no matter how many layers of mud and sand time deposited. Scrape at them and they come up all red and blazing.”

— Helen Simonson

“Clean of officious fence or hedge, Half-wild and wholly tame, The wise turf cloaks the white cliff-edge As when the Romans came.”

— Helen Simonson

“She gathered up a few thoughts of the lovelier parts of the afternoon and stowed them away in the back of her mind, where they might remind her at some future date that lovely afternoons do not survive the chill of dusk.”

— Helen Simonson

“Look, the truth belongs to the guy who's best at sticking to his story,' said Ferguson.”

— Helen Simonson

“In which local hero Colonel Arthur Pettigrew, of the British army in India, held off a train full of murderous thugs to rescue a local Maharajah's youngest wife. For his heroism, the Colonel was awarded a British Order of Merit and personally presented with a pair”

— Helen Simonson

“War does have a way of interfering with one's most closely held desires.”

— Helen Simonson

The sky began to spit fat drops of rain and a cold gust of wind whipped dust and litter against his legs. The sadness vanished and he thought how glorious the day was.

— Helen Simonson

“Often, I think, thy don't believe in anything at all and they just want to prove to themselves that I don't really believe anything either. (The Vicar)”

— Helen Simonson

“You cannot run away from what's in your heart.”

— Helen Simonson

“My neighbor Alice Pierce is fond of singing folk music to her garden plants. Thinks it makes them grow or something. The Major had often wondered how a wailing rendition of 'Greensleeves' would encourage greater raspberry production but Alice insisted that it worked far better than chemical fertilizers, and she did produce several kinds of fruit in pie-worthy quantitites. No sense of pitch, but plenty of enthusiasm, he added.”

— Helen Simonson