That was the first time her grandfather had leaned down and whispered, Be brave, into her ear. And then, Or pretend to be. It’s all the same.
In the mirror, she’d seen more than her face. She’d seen the girl she’d been before all of this. A dreamer, a believer. Someone who would go places. How had she forgotten all of that?
When times is tough and jobs is scarce, folks blame the outsider. It’s human nature.
The things your parents say and the things your husband doesn’t say become a mirror, don’t they? You see yourself as they see you, and no matter how far you come, you bring that mirror with you.
There was something she hadn’t known when she went into marriage and became a mother that she knew now: it was only possible to live without love when you’d never known it.
Some lives are not ours to hold on to; God makes His choices without us.
The children’s lives would never be the same after today. Their opinions of everything would change, but especially their opinions of themselves, of the durability of love and the truth of their family. They would know forever that their father hadn’t loved their mother – or them – enough to stay with them through hard times.
Love. In the best of times, it is a dream. In the worst of times, a salvation.
Remember, cara, hard times don’t last. Land and family do.
You blame yourself when they are the ones to blame.” Rose gave her a steady, reassuring look. “Remember, cara, hard times don’t last. Land and family do.
How can we call ourselves the land of the free when people are living on the streets and dying of hunger?
Poverty was a soul-crushing thing. A cave that tightened around you, its pinprick of light closing a little more at the end of each desperate, unchanged day.
Maybe that’s how God provides. He put me in your path and you in mine.
The idea of it, of staying here and finding a good life and a place to belong, seduced her as nothing ever had.
But she wasn’t an I. She was a we. Her two beautiful children were counting on her, even if Loreda didn’t know it yet.
She’d learned how to disappear in place long ago. She was like one of those animals whose defense mechanism is to blend into the landscape and become invisible. It was her way of dealing with rejection: Say nothing and disappear. Never fight back. If she remained quiet enough, people eventually forgot she was there and left her alone.
Missing him. Longing for him. Worrying about him. Those were her nighttime journeys.
The library. Books held the answer to every question.
The love, it comes in the beginning of her life and at the end of yours. God is cruel that way.
The four winds have blown us here, people from all across the country, to the very edge of this great land, and now, at last, we make our stand, fight for what we know to be right. We fight for our American dream, that it will be possible again. Jack says that I am a warrior and, while I don’t believe it, I know this: A warrior believes in an end she can’t see and fights for it. A warrior never gives up. A warrior fights for those weaker than herself. It sounds like motherhood to me.