Polly was pretty good at dieting, all right, but she was beginning to wonder whether you ever lost the parts of your self that you wanted to lose.
She wanted him to see all of her and also none of her. She wanted him to be dazzled by the bits and blinded by the whole. She wanted him to see her whole and not in pieces. She had hopes that were hard to satisfy.
She had willed her heart to stay small and contained, but it wouldn’t be. Oh, well.
She realized all at once the deeper thing that bothered her, the thing that made him not just irritating but intolerable: how he kept loving her blindly when she deserved it so little.
No matter how far back you cut a willow tree, it will never really die.
It’s always nervewracking to put yourself out there. But it’s the root of joy.
There were certain qualities you possessed carelessly. And you couldn’t retrieve them when they were gone. The very act of caring made them impossible to regain.
One must have a good memory to keep the promises one has made.
There are some people who fall in love over and over.
Love didn’t necessarily look the way you expected it to.
Different people were good at different things, Lena mused. Lena was good at writing thank-you notes, for instance, and Effie was good at being happy.
Wear them, they will make you brave.
Don’t talk to me. I’m tired and grumpy and I’ll probably make fun of you.
She perched on her windowsill, gazing at the lurid sun soaking into the Caldera, trying to appreciate it even though she couldn’t have it. Why did she always feel she had to do something in the face of beauty?
Lena knew she had spent too much of her life in a state of passive dread, just waiting for something bad to happen. In a life like that, relief was as close as you got to happiness.
The weather turned. Her skin seemed to grow a million extra pores, and all of them opened to take in the warmth and tenderness of the air. The sun on her face made her want to cry. Into all those millions of open pores came the sunshine, and other feelings as well. In and out. She was porous.
People left a lot of things behind when they went in the water. Their clothes, their stuff, their makeup, their fixed-up hair, their voices, their hearing, their sight – at least as the normally experienced them.
Love made you admire funny things about a person, like how good she was at remembering to return her library books and at slicing cucumbers very thin. She was a veritable wonder at pulling a splinter out of her foot.
All the things she planned to feel, the way she planned to look and seem, the appropriate things she planned to say. None of them came to pass.
It’s natural to overlook and even sacrifice the things that belong to us most easily most gracefully. So here’s me asking you to please not make that mistake.