Devotion Hannah Kent Quotes

Thea, if love were a thing, it would be the sinew of a hand stretched in anticipation of grasping. See, my hands, they reach for you. My heart is a hand reaching.

Thea, in all incarnations, wherever my soul has resided, I have loved you, am loving you, will love you. If the earth one day burns out its charge, you will find me in the ash. if the sea dries, find me in its sand. Fingers forever writing your name in ash, in sand, over and over in a love-patterned wasteland.

Dying is unlike living. The smooth running of time is for the beating heart only. The dead stutter. The hands on my clock do not turn to numbers but to each other.

I wish now that we had the language of what was unfolding between us in those moments. I wish that, with Thea’s hand in my hair, her nearness sounding through me like hallelujah, like fever’s refrain, I had allowed myself to consider the possibility of different devotions. That I had considered the weight of a plain ripe pear in hand, the promise of the juice down my wrist. That we had pushed ourselves of the precipice. That once began we could no sooner stop than we could defy gravity. I wished I had drawn closer to Thea then. Willed her to kiss me. Deeply, so that the whole world turned in revolution.