She would hold her daughter and stroke her head and let her cry and she would have to be strong. She was so tired of being strong.
Sooner or later, Meg, it’s always about family. The past has an irritating way of becoming the present.
Leni sighed. How was Mama’s unshakable belief in Dad any different than his fear of Armageddon? Did adults just look at the world and see what they wanted to see, think what they wanted to think? Did evidence and experience mean nothing?
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” – T. S. Eliot, from “East Coker.
We’re all afraid,” Anita said. “It’s the going on that matters.
In that one image, Matthew saw the whole of his life; past, present, and future. It was one of those moments – an instant of grace in a crazy, sometimes impossibly dangerous world – that changed a man’s life.
Don’t take peace for granted. It can shatter like glass.
In the end, I really believe that we’re all living versions of the same life.
They’d talked about the past in their bits-and-pieces way. Never all at once, never one big end-up-crying-and-hugging moment, but a constant brushing up of the past, reexamining actions and decisions and beliefs, offering apologies, forgiveness. All of it had brought them closer to who they were, who they’d always been. Mother and daughter. Their essential, immutable bond – fragile enough to snap at a harsh word a long time ago, durable enough to survive death itself. “Mommy! There you are,” MJ.
That’s one of my major themes in Firefly Lane – that we need to accept that we are good enough, that all we can do is our best.
In literature, death was many things – a message, catharsis, retribution.
Reviewers claimed that she could see a way through any emotional conflict; more often than not, they mentioned the purity of her heart. But they were wrong. It was the impurity in her heart that made her successful. She was an ordinary woman who’d made extraordinary mistakes. She understood every nuance of need and loss.
Claire knew she loved her daughter too much; it was dangerous to need another human being so desperately, but Claire had never known any other way to love.
For the first time, her romantic novels made sense; she realized that the landscape of a woman’s soul could change as quickly as a world at war.
In that quiet, Ruby heard the echo of a broken family; they were individual pieces, now separate, wanting a wholeness that had been shattered.
You’re afraid of love, but you’ve got so much of it to give.
On paper, did she and Mama even exist? And what if he found them anyway?
In Paris, with a glass of wine in your hand, you can just be.
Some things in life, though, couldn’t be gone in search of. They simply had to be waited for. Like the weather. You could look on the horizon and see a bank of black storm clouds. That didn’t guarantee rain tomorrow. It might just as easily dawn bright and clear. There was no damn way to tell. All you could do was keep moving and live your life.
Isabelle had always been impetuous, a force of nature, really, a girl who liked to break rules. Countless nuns and teachers had learned that she could be neither controlled nor contained.