I can stand on my own in a world that is falling apart. I can stand so well, I realize, that I can support someone else.
I had believed that I was running away from what had happened. I did not know – not until I met Nicholas days later – that the whole time I was really running toward what was yet to be.
I wouldn’t know what being in love felt like if it hit me in the face.
I know these ghosts. I know what it’s like to move around in the world, but not really be a part of it. And I know what it’s like to have people stare right through you, and not believe what they are seeing. If I exist, why can’t they?
It was easier for girls. They could say This hurts, or I don’t like how this feels, and have the complaint be socially acceptable. Boys, though, didn’t speak that language. They didn’t learn it as children and they didn’t manage to pick it up as adults, either.
When the universe calls, don’t place it on hold.
It is impossible to believe anything in a world that has ceased to regard man as man, that repeatedly proves that one is no longer a man.
Whatever I do right I chalk up to my father’s example. Whatever I do wrong I blame squarely on fate.
I didn’t plan to love you. And by the time I knew I did, I couldn’t tell you what you deserved to know.” He hesitates, his face shuttered. “I never wanted to hurt you.
Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, Dr. King had said, what are you doing for others?
People who run away either have something they’re trying to reach or something they’re trying to avoid.
The same things that trip you up as a human will tie you in knots as a spirit, if you don’t let go and let God.
When the matriarch is gone, so is the herd’s collective memory.
You would think bearing witness to something like this would make a difference, and yet this isn’t so. In the newspapers I have read about history repeating itself in Cambodia. Rwanda. Sudan.
Sometimes I think there’s a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that’s where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can’t help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite. And just at this moment, it chose to rear its ugly head. I blinked at my father, cranked the volume, and said – too loudly, “Pass the potatoes.
When you love someone, you’ll do anything you can to keep them with you.
It’s not the years in your life that count, but the life in your years.
He kissed her so gently she wondered if she had imagined it.
Amnesia was one way for the mind to protect itself from reliving something that would otherwise break you apart.
Kate had the shape of a pixie, all noodle arms and legs; and when she bent to the ground and kicked up her feet, it looked as delicate as a spider walking a wall. Me, I sort of defied gravity with a thud.