A risk is a risk because it’s avoidable.
We’re all just ingredients. What matters is the grace with which you cook the meal.
You could never be certain what you would find in a book that had spent time with someone else.
If you live in your senses, slowly, with attention, if you use your eyes and your fingertips and your taste buds, then romance is something you’ll never need a greeting card to make you remember.
I am starting to think that maybe memories are like this dessert. I eat it, and it becomes a part of me, whether I remember it later or not.
Life is beautiful. Some people just remind you of that more than others.
She said, ‘You can be broken, or broken open. That choice is yours.’
Marriage is a leap of faith. You are each other’s safety net.
We sat in silence, letting the green in the air heal what it could.
Scents were like rain, or birds. They left and came back.
Maybe that’s how it always is, I thought – we all just go along, catching glimpses of one another, thinking we know everything.
The kids threw the rumors out like lit matches, to see what would catch. I stayed silent, listening to the fizz and spark of their words, pretending I was water, putting them out.
It was like trying to teach subtlety to a thunderstorm.
Scents were always about what was growing and what was dying. What would last through the next season. This was just with people instead of trees or flowers or dirt. Maybe I could read them after all. The thought gave me hope.
I listened, while the scents found their hiding places in the cracks in the floorboards, and the words of the story, and the rest of my life.
Suddenly she was seeing the buds on the cherry trees around her; she could feel the energy packed within them, a bouquet of fireworks whose fuse had already been lit. She could smell them, too, a subtle essence of pink and lollipops, the sweetness deepened by the scent of the slowly warming earth below them.
It’s amazing how easily we can cast ourselves in the role of hero.
Maybe your mind won’t remember what I cooked last week, but your body will.
It felt as if my whole life had been shaped by things people wouldn’t say.
Her song was so beautiful that it could take people back to all the things they wished they had done, and all the things they wished they could be.