It occurred to her that nobody really knew what anybody else was upset about, and that seemed like a terrible thing.
I lay there and thought how life was like a Littmus Lozenge, how the sweet and the sad were all mixed up together and how hard it was to separate them out. It was confusing.
Do you know what it means to be emphatic? I will tell you: It means that when you are being forcibly taken to a dungeon, when you have a large knife at your back, when you are trying to be brave, you are able, still, to think for a moment of the person who is holding the knife.
Her words sounded the way all those things made him feel, as if the world, the real world, had been punched through, so that he could see something wonderful and dazzling on the other side of it.
The world went on. People left and people died and people went to memorial services and put orange blocks of cheese into their purses. People confessed to you that they were hungry all the time. And then you got up in the morning and pretended that none of it had happened.
I have already been loved,” said Edward. “I have been loved by a girl named Abilene. I have been loved by a fisherman and his wife and a hobo and his dog. I have been loved by a boy who played the harmonica and by a girl who died. Don’t talk to me about love,” he said. “I have known love.
The world is dark, and light is precious.
If you want to be a writer, write a little bit every day. Pay attention to the world around you. Stories are hiding, waiting everywhere. You just have to open your eyes and your heart.
It was the strangest things, how happiness came out of nowhere and inflated your soul.
And this is a time to act, not wonder.
How can you make a beautiful ending without making beautiful mistakes.
Stories are light.
Oh, my goodness,” said Louisiana. “I’m just all filled up with feathers and regrets. And fears. I have a lot of fears.
Sometimes there are no reasons. Often, most of the time, there are no reasons. The world cannot be explained.
Once, oh marvelous once, there was a rabbit who found his way home.
There was something scary about watching adults sleep. It was as if no one at all were in charge of the world.
She herself often felt too terrified to go on, but she had never admitted it out loud.
Sometimes, it seemed like everybody in the world was lonely. I thought about my mama. Thinking about her was the same as the hole you keep on feeling with your tongue after you lose a tooth. Time after time, my mind kept going to that empty spot, the spot where i felt like she should be.
Do not hope; instead, observe” were words that Flora, as a cynic, had found useful in the extreme. She repeated them to herself a lot.
I don’t know, Louisiana. I can’t see into the future. I do think that, more often than not, love has a way of finding us.