Remarkable Creatures Quotes

“We say very little, for we do not need to. We are silent together, each in her own world, knowing the other is just at her back.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“What do you believe, Aunt Elizabeth?'
'I believe. . . I am comfortable with reading the Bible figuratively rather than literally. For instance, I think the six days in Genesis are not literal days, but different periods of creation, so that it took many thousands --- or hundreds of thousands of years --- to create. It does not demean God; it simply gives Him more time to build this extraordinary world.'
'And the ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus?'
'They are creatures from long, long ago. They remind us that the world is changing. Of course it is. I can see it change when there are landslips at Lyme that alter the shoreline. It changes when there are earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and floods. And why shouldn't it?”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“There was something different about her, though I could not say exactly what it was. It was as if she were more certain. If someone were sketching her they would use clear, strong lines, whereas before they might have used faint marks and more shading. She was like a fossil that’s been cleaned and set so everyone can see what it is.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“I had always thought of the sea as a boundary keeping me in my place on land. Now, though, it became an opening.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“But dying was no drama. Dying was cold and hard and painful, and dull. It went on too long. I was exhausted and growing bored with it. Now I had too much time to think about whether I was going to die from the tide”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“I never said I didn't want to marry. It just didn't happen-Iam not the sort of lady a man chooses to marry, for I am too plain and too serious. Now I am reconciled to being on my own.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“He made me feel an idiot, even when I knew he was a bigger one than I.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“have noticed that people do not change which feature they lead with, any more than they change in character.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“I have always admired most those who lead with their eyes, like Mary Anning, for they seem more aware of the world and its workings.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“That’s how fossil hunting is: It takes over, like a hunger, and nothing else matters but what you find. And even when you find it, you still start looking again the next minute, because there might be something even better waiting.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“This was the sort of situation that she read about in the novels she favored, by authors such as Miss Jane Austen, whom Margaret was sure she’d met long ago at the Assembly Rooms the first time we visited Lyme. One of Miss Austen’s books had even featured Lyme Regis, but I did not read fiction and could not be persuaded to try it. Life itself was far messier and didn’t end so tidily with the heroine making the right match. We Philpot sisters were the very embodiment of that frayed life. I did not need novels to remind me of what I had missed.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“Margaret grasped on to the magic of novels because they held out hope that Mary—and she herself—might yet have a chance at marriage. While my own experience of life was limited, I knew such a thing would not happen. It hurt, but the truth often does.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“For myself, it took only the early discovery of a golden ammonite, glittering on the beach between Lyme and Charmouth, for me to succumb to the seductive thrill of finding unexpected treasure.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“he was a collector rather than a hunter, buying his knowledge rather than seeking it with his own eyes and hands. I”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“Although we kept the door ajar so that we could hear, we could not see beyond the gentlemen standing in front of the door in the crowded room. I felt trapped behind a wall of men that separated me from the main event.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“Twenty-first-century attitudes towards time and our expectations of story are very different from the shape of Mary Anning’s life. She spent day after day, year after year, doing the same thing on the beach. I have taken the events of her life and condensed them to fit into a narrative that is not stretched beyond the reader’s patience. Hence events, while in order, do not always coincide exactly with actual dates and time spans. Plus, of course, I made up plenty. For instance, while there was gossip about Mary and Buckland and Mary and Birch, there was no proof. That is where only a novelist can step in.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“Era un pensiero doloroso ma la verità lo è sovente.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“There is no need to fear," he said, "for you are here with me.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“marry. Fanny was having all the time what I experienced only the once with Colonel Birch in the orchard. I had my fame to comfort me, and the money it brought in, but that only went so far. I could not hate Fanny, for it were my fault she was crippled. But I could not ever feel friendly towards her nor comfortable round her. That was the case with many people in Lyme. I had come unstuck. I would never be a lady like the Philpots—no one would ever call me Miss Mary. I would be plain Mary Anning. Yet”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“spent much of my life in Lyme with my eyes fixed to the ground in search of fossils. Such hunting can limit a person’s perspective.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“I missed the currency of ideas. In London we had been part of a wide circle of solicitors’ families, and social occasions had been mentally stimulating as well as entertaining.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“While Molly and Joseph Anning suffered materially that winter, with many days of weak soup and weaker fires, Mary barely noticed how little she was eating or the chilblains on her hands and feet. She was suffering inside.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“Truly to appreciate what fossils are requires a leap of imagination he was not capable of making.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“I knew I should believe him, as he taught at Oxford, but his answers did not feel complete. It was like having a meal and not getting quite enough to eat.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“not of this world,”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“Life itself was far messier and didn’t end so tidily with the heroine making the right match.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“Mientras contemplábamos el fósil, sentí por un momento que su espiral me absorbía y me hacía retroceder cada vez más lejos en el tiempo hasta que el pasado se perdía en su centro.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Las huellas de la vida

“We had not meant our choice to cut us off from our past, but it did. We had only the present and the future to think of in Lyme.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“Yes, Mary Anning, you are different from all the rocks on the beach.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“It is not easy to let someone go, even when they have said unforgivable things to you.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures