But I was not a mouse. In the fields where I walked, I was much more interested in the actions of the hawks.
A woman who knows what she wants, Adelle always told me, is likely to receive it.
She’s beginning to wonder if perhaps she’s haunting herself.
What’s done cannot be undone. What’s set into motion takes on a life of its own.
Men and women rarely speak to each other, though they often talk.
It’s not easy. It never is. That is the secret our parents fail to tell us, out of kindness and love, but it’s a secret we need to know. Everything that begins, ends. Everything beautiful disappears.
Love has nothing to do with time or space.
I knew that men told you the truth for one of two reasons: when they wished to be rid of what they couldn’t bear to carry, or when they wished to include you in what they knew so their stories wouldn’t be lost.
All the same, there were some things they needed to learn. Do not drink milk after a thunderstorm, for it will certainly be sour. Always leave out seed for the birds when the first snow falls. Wash your hair with rosemary. Drink lavender tea when you cannot sleep. Know that the only remedy for love is to love more.
Life is beautiful, just very unfair.
It was easy to lie to people who still believed in the truth.
If you tried to right all the wrongs in the world you’d exhaust yourself in under an hour.
The truth was written upon us, as they say men’s sins are written on their bones so that when they die their wicked deeds can be read as if written upon parchment.
Children would beg for a peppermint drop each time he walked into town, and they’d follow behind, asking for a second and a third. When he died suddenly, while working late at his office, every boy and girl in the village reported smelling mint in the night air, as if somehing sweet had passed them right by.
I’m glad it all happened,” he says, “Even the bad parts.
Stone should last forever, but on that night I came to understand that a stone was only another form of dust. Streams of holy dust loomed in the air, and every breath included remnants of the Temple, so that we inhaled that which was meant to stand through eternity.
There is the outside of a story, and there is the inside of a story, he told me as we sat in his library one afternoon. One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed.
He is gone and all we have is this world, here and now.
That was how evil spoke. It made its own corrupt sense; it swore that the good were evil, and that evil had come to save mankind.
If a woman is in trouble, she should always wear blue for protection.