I’ve always been a loner, and I’ve never really felt like I belong here. I’m like one of those women who read Jane Austen obsessively and still hope that Mr. Darcy might show up at the door. Or the Civil War reenactors, who growl at each other on battlefields now spotted with baseball fields and park benches. I’m the princess in an ivory tower, except every brick is made of history, and I built this prison myself.
Because it takes more strength to change someone else’s life than it takes to change your own.
There is no grief amount wolves. Nature has a wonderful way of making you face reality. You can sit and weep if you want, but you are likely to be killed while you’re still in your mourning, because you let your guard down.
It’s been a long time,” I reply, when what I really want to do is ask her what she’s been doing for the past fifteen years. If she still drinks tea with milk and lemon. If she’s happy.
She did not understand this but then there was much in the world she did not understand. Raw love, like raw heartache could blindside you. It could make you forget what you did not know to focus exclusively on those few pieces you could commit to heart.
Could you love someone so much that, even without meaning to, you hurt them?
Because when you get right down to it, the only person you should trust is the one you’d lay down your life for.
When was the last time he’d been swallowed whole by love?
Words, he knew, could scar.
You’d think a house would last forever, but the truth is a strong wind or a wrecking ball can devastate it. The family inside is not so different.
Oliver,” she says. “You can do this.” I watch her walk away. When Delilah talks like that, it’s easy to remember why I gave up everything I knew in order to be with her. She believes in me, and if someone believes in you wholeheartedly, you start to believe in yourself as well.
She had given me my first crayons and coloring book, and had held me when I messed up, assuring me that the lines were for people with no imagination.
To find out a heart she’d believed irrevocably broken had somewhere along the way been fixed.
Because you make me believe there are things worth fighting for.
Every life has a beginning, a middle, and an end; dissect history and you’ll see the word that defines it as a tale, a narrative.
I’m sure I’m worth a lot more dead than alive – the sum of the parts equals more than the whole.
Better safe than sorry!
My father died last year,” Thomas said. “I still look for him in crowds.
How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turned the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, but as long as Em was with him, he was at home?
There’s a word we learned in social studies: schadenfreude. It’s when you enjoy watching someone else suffer. The real question though, is why? I think part of it is self preservation. And part of it is because a group always feels more like a group when it’s banded together against an enemy. It doesn’t matter if that enemy has never done anything to hurt you-you just have to pretend you hate someone even more than you hate yourself.