What she feels for him is so deep, she aches. She supposes this is what people refer to when they say the pangs of love, as if your innermost joy cannot help but cause you anguish as well.
Before she can stop herself, she thinks about desire, how it lives within you and yet is separate, surfacing when it chooses, without permission, in the harsh afternoon light, at the moment when you least expect to find it.
Forever – is composed of – Nows.
Somehow, what they’d had was already over, and she hadn’t even been aware of the end. This happened with roses: it was possible to take them for granted all summer as they wound along fences and gates, and then in September, when they faded, how beautiful they’d once been suddenly took hold. That was when people began to yearn for them, and all winter long they’d watch the bare branches for buds, vowing that this time they’d be grateful for all that they had.
But love was not about practice or preparation, it was pure chance; if you took your time with it you ran the risk of having it evaporate before it had even begun.
To love someone so complicated you had to be committed to a single emotion – the way you loved him – no matter what. In that way, it was indeed simple.
I’d thrown my fate away once, and I would never again allow other people’s opinions rule my life. As a girl I’d done what was necessary, but I was a girl no longer. Adelle.
In the dining hall of the home, Stella had seen so much death, that one Saturday morning she’d been compelled to sink down onto the linoleum floor, overwhelmed not so much by the sorrow of it all, but by the human dignity, the almost supernatural ability to face the abyss and still order scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast.
But rules were never the point. It was finding out who you were.
They learned that sometimes the most dangerous thing of all in matters of live was to be granted your heart’s desire.
Nowadays, she doesn’t even look in a mirror. She’s afraid no one will be staring back at her.
Life is trouble, brother. You’ve got to fight for what you want.
The place where what someone needs and what she desires cross each other to become one.
She liked to disappear, even when she was in the same room as other people. It was a talent, as it was a curse. There was something that come between Emily and other people, a white linen curtain, hazy. It made the world quieter and farther away, although occasionally she could see through to the other side.
I would have drowned without you to watch over me... I now understand there are a thousand ways to drown, and a thousand ways to rescue someone.
Love someone and they’re yours forever, no matter how much time intervenes, that’s what Margaret Grey knew. The sky will always be blue; the wind will always rise up across the meadow and thread its way through the grass.
It had been better to have viewed him from a distance, so that his flaws were left unseen.
There are those who say that heaven and hell are not so far apart. They are not at opposite ends of the world beyond ours, only a step away from one another.
That’s still the best reading experience: falling in love with a book I meet by accident.
She, who prided herself on her tough exterior, could always be undone by the beauty of flight.