A person is never as quiet as they seem, we are thickly layered page lying upon page behind simple covers.
Sorry, sorry, sorry. Oh, you can pile on as many as you want, but the guilt is still there, like that pea under all those mattresses.
Books make you feel things hard.
You never know what a day will bring, which is both the good news and band news of life.
Love doesn’t seem to follow a plan; it’s not a series of steps. It can hit with the force of nature – an earthquake, a tidal wave, a storm of wild, relentless energy that is beyond your simple attempts at control.
I guess after all those years he had exhausted me. I never knew I was signing up for a battle, but I finally knew that he had won.
Nature is never static, I understand. Change is ever-constant, clouds zipping across a sky. It is dynamic, complicated, tangled, mostly beautiful. A moving forward, something newly gained, means that something is lost, too.
What came next wasn’t exactly silence, because although it was quiet, a thousand things were being said. I hated that part about an unhappy household – that feeling of being perched and listening, the way an animal must feel at night in the dark, assessing danger.
Niceness is expected of her, not honesty.
Dread begins to inch in. No. Dread isn’t one of those subtle emotions. It moves in and takes over, and then it drips and hands, like Spanish moss.
I confess I had a Child of Divorce Reunion Fantasy Number One Thousand, where I for a moment imagined my father finding out that Dino really was a killer woman and that my parents would have to get back together. I saw them running through a meadow, hand in hand. Okay, maybe not a meadow. But I saw me having only one Christmas and one phone number and only my father’s shaved bristles in the bathroom sink.
I always seemed to forget that needing your mother and getting what you needed from your mother were separate but neighboring planets.
When it comes to sisters, it seems one stays and one goes, one remains bound and the other is set free. She is who she is in good part because of who Gloria isn’t. In order to be herself, in order to be different from her sister, she had to take what was left over, the opposite, unchosen road. She is both glad and furious about it.
I love to see those paragliders weaving softly around Moon Point, their legs floating above you in the air. When they drift in for a landing, their feet touch the ground and they trot forward from the continued motion of the glider, which billows down like a setting sun. I never get tired of watching them and I’ve seen them thousands of times. I always wondered what that kind of freedom would feel like.
Nice is akin to not walking under ladders or stepping on cracks. It’s a superstitious hedging of bets. A part of you thinks your good behavior will ward off evil. Well, apparently that’s not true.
I’m fine.” Oh, how we love and overuse fine, our all-purpose little evasion. Fine means not fine. Fine means Pity me. Fine means Don’t ask.
They call an abusive relationship a cycle of violence, when really it’s a cycle of hope. It’s a cycle of misguided optimism. One day that optimism is gone, if you’re lucky.
More, much more, will happen after this. Things involving maps and books and true love and tragedy, tragedy like you wouldn’t believe. But fine things too. The best ones.
Good can sit in the distance, just beyond your view, waiting, until you go toward it.
When the story gets sad and terrible, when there are too many mistakes to count, hang on for the beautiful parts.