Quotes By Author: Susan Vreeland

“It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials – I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered – it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it’s only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments.”

“Palmira. She’s like an apparition floating unknowingly into her future,’ I said. ‘Here for too brief a time.”

“She was a desperate woman with frailties just like her, temptations just like her, a woman who had needs, a woman who loved almost to the point of there being no more her anymore, a woman who probably cried too much, just like her, a woman afraid, wanting to believe rather than believing […]”

“I came to see that knowing what love isn’t might be just as valuable, though infinitely less satisfying, as knowing what it is.”

“You know, bicycling isn’t just a matter of balance,” I said. “it’s a matter of faith. You can keep upright only by moving forward. You have to have your eyes on the goal, not the ground. I’m going to call that the Bicyclist’s Philosophy of Life.”