Cold Mountain Love Quotes

He put his hands to her shoulders a moment and she settled back with her head beneath his chin. Ada remembered thinking that she never wished to leave this place but was not aware that she had said it aloud. What she did remember was that he had seemed as content as she was and had not pressed for more but only moved his hands out to the points of her shoulders and held her there. She remembered the smell of his damp wool suit and a lingering smell of horse and tack. (4.44)

The months when we knew you were to come seemed a strange blessing for a pair such as we were: old and marred by the past. When Claire died in childbirth, I could not hardly think that God would be so short with us. I could do little for weeks. Kind neighbors found a wet nurse for you and I took to my bed. When I rose again, it was with the determination that my life was now at your service. (8.156)

But what she said was, We might never speak again, and I don't plan to leave that comment standing in place of the truth. You're not owning up to it, but you came with expectations and they were not realized. Largely because I behaved contrary to my heart. I'm sorry for that. And I would do it differently if given a chance to go back and revise. (10.114)

He described her [Ada's] character and her person item by item and said the verdict he had come to at the hospital was that he loved her and wished to marry her, though he realized marriage implied some faith in a theoretical future, a projection of paired lines running forward through time, drawing nearer and nearer to one another until they became one line. It was a doctrine he could not entirely credit. Nor was he at all sure Ada would find his offer welcome, not from a man galled in body and mind as he had become. (11.139)

She thought about the refrain of a tune Stobrod had sung that night, a ragged love song. Its ultimate line was: Come back to me is my request […] Ada had to admit that, at least now and again, just saying what your heart felt, straight and simple and unguarded, could be more useful than four thousand lines of John Keats. She had never been able to do it in her whole life, but she thought she would like to learn how. (13.108)

She went in the house and got her lap desk and a candle lantern and came back to the chair. She inked her pen and then sat and stared at the paper until her nib dried out. Every phrase she thought of seemed nothing but pose and irony. She wiped the pen clean on a blotter and dipped again and wrote, Come back to me is my request. She signed her name and folded the paper and addressed it to the hospital in the capital. (13.109)

He did not know what to say, so he said what his dream in the gypsy camp had told him. I've been coming to you on a hard road and I'm not letting you go. (17.50)

But something in him would not let him step forward to embrace her. It was not only the shotgun keeping him back. Dying was not the point. He could not step forward. He held out his empty hands palms up at his sides.

Ada still did not know him. (17.51-52)

—I do not know you, [Ada] said.

Inman heard the words and they seemed just. Entirely warranted, and in some way expected. He thought, Four years gone warring, but back now on home ground and I'm no better than a rank stranger here. A wandering pilgrim in my own place. Such is the price I'll pay for the past four years. Firearms standing between me and everything I want. (17.53-54)

When Ada disappeared into the trees, it was like a part of the richness of the world had gone with her. He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear space for something better. (19.14)