But the best stories were about their mother, how her hair was as red as blood, how she had seventy-four freckles on her face, how she was a ferryboat captain’s daughter who believed that people could fly.
When you change your name you change your fate as well.
She kept a stack of books near the tub so she could read in the bath, even though the edges of the pages turned moldy. She read on trains and on buses, which often made her late as she was forever missing her stop.
Like the rabbi with the red circle, she should have said “no” to everything. She should have become a raven. She didn’t understand that every word the judge said was a trap, in that every word she said could easily be a stone used to shut her into that trap.
Hochman had been right, the past was what we carried with us, threaded to the future, and we decided whether to keep it close or let it go. Fate was both what we were given and what we made for ourselves.
All things change, for that is the way of the world we walk through.
She said she wanted a man like that, someone who understood sorrow, not someone who caused it.
A decade or two on the rocks gives a person character. Although she’d never believe it, those lines in Gillian’s face are the most beautiful part about her. They reveal what she’s gone through and what she’s survived and who exactly she is, deep inside.
I had never before noticed that rain contained every color within itself, green as the fields, blue as heaven, white as a lamb, yellow as my daughter’s hair.
Whoever gives his true self away does do with words.
Love like this wasn’t what he’d planned or wanted or expected, surely it was indeed a trap, for even when you tried to run away, it followed you through the grass and lay down beside you, it overtook common sense and willpower.
I thought perhaps I had been wrong, too quick to judge the essence of a being by its appearance, still not fully understanding that, in the world God has given us, all things must change.
Among men and women, those in love do not always announce themselves with declarations and vows. But they are the ones who weep when you’re gone. Who miss you every single night, especially when the sky is so deep and beautiful, and the ground so very cold.
I’m at the point where going forward is easier than going back.
Real love, after all, was worth the price you paid, however briefly it might last.
This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed.
Once you know some things, you can’t unknow them. It’s a burden that can never be given away.
When you start writing the magic comes when the characters seem to take on a life of their own and write the words for themselves.
Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were. Butterflies for instance, and women who’ve been in love with the wrong man too often.
No one knows you like a person with whom you’ve shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way.