Here lies the life I might have had once upon a time, the man I might have loved for all my life, the days we might have had.
Nathaniel Hawthorne had placed the w in his name to distance himself from his cruel ancestor, his writing driven by his desire to make amends for all the evil his great-great-grandfather had done in the world.
She shuffled her feet as she was told that she had been taken in by the family as an infant, and that every family in town without a daughter adopted a girl infant or child. She was raised to inherit the laundry and the housekeeping, the cooking and the sorrow, and the kindling of the fire in the early morning when no one else would even think of getting out from beneath the mountains of blankets and quilts.
Women were hurt every day and kept the cause to themselves.
It’s for your own good,” she said tenderly. “All I want for you is a normal life.” “Mother,” Franny sighed. “What makes you think that’s what I want?
The garden was burning, the air sparked with specks of flame as they say it will be in the World-to-Come when we walk beside the angels and have no fear of their illuminations or of their might.
She kissed him first, and all the rest followed.
I have wondered all my life what I am made of, if there is a straw inside of me, or a beating heart, or if I simply burned for all I did not have.
In two weeks a man could completely refashion his history; he could walk all the way to Ohio or Iowa, change his name and his accent, disappear into another life. In the woods, footprints faded, the wind rose up to disperse of clothing, flesh became grass.
Vincent gave him the twenty. “You don’t think you might be looking for trouble?” Levi thanked Vincent for the loan, but laughed at the question. “Life is trouble, brother. You’ve got to fight for what you want.
When she reached 44 Greenwich Avenue she went inside alone, and only the crow knew that it was possible for a woman to claim to have no heart at all and still cry as though her heart would break.
When you truly love someone and they love you in return, you ruin your lives together.
Isn’t that what love makes you do? Go on trying even when you’re through. Go on even when you’re made of ash, when there’s nothing left inside you but the past?
I had lost my mother and my father and my sister, and sometimes when I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window, I wondered if perhaps I hadn’t lost myself as well.
You rescue something and you’re responsible for it. But maybe that’s what love is.
Even with her failing vision, Violet West could see the scars. They had turned purple, almost red, from the icy cold, the color of the pears on the tree in the yard, the color of blood that can’t be washed away and of things that can never be undone.
Perhaps in the cold my heart would freeze and I would care nothing for those I was forced to abandon.
Is there more to the story?” Vincent asked. “There’s more to every story,” his aunt told him.
I had never felt so alive as when reading.
To want someone so much could be a terrible thing, or it could be the best hope a man could have.