It felt both profoundly magical and beautifully ordinary.
Why was it that pebbles looked like boulders until they were in your rearview mirror?
Some years June is spring, July is summer, August is autumn, and everything else is winter.
Forgiveness doesn’t matter, does it, Dean? When a thing is done, it’s done. You can’t unring a bell.
I think you stand by the people you love. That was what he’d said, and it was what she would do.
Summer ended. Hot golden days gave way to washed-out skies and falling rain. Isabelle was so focused on the escape route that she hardly noticed the change in weather. On.
Women wrote their names on scraps of paper or cloth and shoved them through cracks in the carriage walls, hoping against hope to be remembered.
That spring, rain fell in great sweeping gusts that rattled the rooftops. Water found its way into the smallest cracks and undermined the sturdiest foundations. Chunks of land that had been steady for generations fell like slag heaps on the roads below, taking houses and cars and swimming pools down with them.
I don’t know how romantic I am, but I only know one way to love... All the way. When I love, I risk my heart. All or nothing.
Nina lowered the camera slowly, feeling naked suddenly, vulnerable. Without that thin layer of a glass lens, she was here instead of there, looking at her father, who was dying.
After so many solitary years, spent tucked away in convents and forgotten in boarding schools, Isabelle never took for granted the fact that now she had friends, people whom she cared about and who cared about her.
You’ll make it through, Jo. You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met.
If I had told him the truth long ago, or had danced and drunk and sung more, maybe he would have seen me instead of a dependable, ordinary mother. He loves a version of me that is incomplete. I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I’d like to be known.
There is no middle ground, no safe place; not here, in the Great Alone.
I was taught by my father to be afraid of the world, and some of the lessons stuck. I read about Patty Hearst and the Zodiac Killer and the massacre at the Munich Olympics and Charles Manson, and I knew the world was a terrifying place. He said it all of the time, reminded me that mountains could blow up and kill people in their sleep. Governments were corrupt. A flu could come out of nowhere and kill millions. A nuclear bomb could fall at any second, obliterating everything.
I know what it is like; some images, once seen, can never be forgotten.
Prayers and faith will not be enough, I’m afraid. The path of righteousness is often dangerous. Get ready, Vianne. This is only your first test. Learn from it.” Mother.
In the years that she had been tying scraps to the branches, the tree had died and the fruit had turned bitter. The other apple trees were hale and healthy, but this one, the tree of her remembrances, was as black and twisted as the bombed-out town behind it.
She wanted to pray, but her faith felt far away, the remnant of another woman’s life.
They hadn’t loved each other enough in the time they had, and then time ran out.