This is what happens when you repudiate who you are. Once you do that, life works against you, and your fate is no longer your own.
If you are loved, you never lose the person who loved you. You carry them with you all your life.
As I turned the pages, I felt as if there were bees on my fingertips, for I had never felt so alive as when reading.
They say that dogs may dream, and when Topsy was old, his feet would move in his sleep. With his eyes closed he would often make a noise that sounded quite human, as if greeting someone in his dreams. At first it seemed that he believed Sara would return, but as the years went by I understood that his loyalty asked for no reward, and that love comes in unexpected forms. His wish was small, as hers had been – merely to be beside her. As for me, I already knew I would never get what I wanted.
For what you can fix, there are a hundred remedies. For what cannot be cured, not even words will do.
Then let us be among those who hope that the future will be less cruel than the past.
Any weapon touched by a woman, even by accident, must be cleansed with both water and prayer so that her essence would not linger, diverting the warrior who might use it next, for even the faintest touch could bring lust to that man’s heart. Perhaps that meant a woman who was well trained in arms would be the superior warrior, her attention never wavering from her task.
Our house was littered with books- in the kitchen, under the beds, stuck between the couch pillows – far too many for her the ever finish. I suppose I thought if my grandmother kept up her interests, she wouldn’t die; she’d have to stay around to finish the books she was so fond of. “I’ve got to get to the bottom of this one,” she’d say, as if a book were no different from a pond or a lake. I thought she’d go on reading forever but it didn’t work out that way.
Then I understood that when someone begins to tell you her story, you are entwined together. Perhaps even more so if the ending hasn’t been divulged.
Fourth time’s the charm,” she says to people who ask her what the secret of a happy marriage is, but that’s not the way she feels about it. She knows now that when you don’t lose yourself in the bargain, you find you have double the love you started with, and that’s one recipe that can’t be tampered with.
Life was beautiful, everyone knew that, but it was also bitter and bleak and unfair as hell and where did that leave a person? On the outs with the rest of the world. Someone who sat alone in the cafeteria, reading, escaping from his hometown simply by turning the page.
Everything we knew condemned us, and our questioning condemned us most of all. Knowledge was the way of our people, and knowledge was dangerous. It was the first thing that freed you and the thing that put you in peril. It was the key to the ten gates. I saw them clearly now, each and every one, the gates that were there for me. Ashes, Bones, Grass, Heart, Stone, Love, Sorrow, Blood, Earth, Sky.
I just stored up my hurts, as if they were a tower made of fallen stars, invisible to most people, but brightly burning inside of me.
I knew what happened in fairy tales. The strong survived while the weak were eaten alive.
The lonelier you are, the more you pull away, until humans seem an alien race, with customs and a language you can’t begin to understand.
People say if you face your worst fear, the rest is easy, but those are people who are afraid of rattlesnakes or enclosed spaces, not of themselves and the horrible things they’ve done.
I think of life as a book of stories. You move through the stories and the characters change. But once you have a name on your skin you are stuck with one story, even if it’s a bad one.
When you were young you were afraid of ghosts, and when you were aged you called them to you.
You couldn’t see love, or touch it, or taste it, yet it could destroy you and leave you in the dark, chasing after your own destiny.
She doesn’t have a mother anymore. There’s no one to whom she’s the most important person in the world.