Sometimes you have to do everything right and follow the rules. You have to wait until all your ducks are in a row before you make a move. And other times... like now... you have to say ‘what the hell’ and go for it.
Alone is overrated,” he said simply.
Lost is lost; it’s when you want someone to hold you but there is no one who can. Lost is alone, even when people are all around you.
You’d be surprised at what I can do.
Some people see a glass as half empty; some see it as half full. I put the glass in a cupboard and forget it’s there. You get my point?
She had this terrible, irrational fear that if she let go of him she would never touch him again and the thought of that was paralyzing.
Remember this, she thought. The way the light caught in his unruly hair, the love in his brown eyes, the chapped lips that had kissed her only an hour ago, in the darkness.
A searing, cleansing, enveloping love blew her heart into a million tiny pieces and reshaped it.
Mama could never leave Dad, and Leni would never leave Mama. And Dad could never let them go. In this toxic knot that was their family, there was no escape for any of them.
You can be anything you want. But you have to take a risk sometimes. Reach out.
I don’t know the right thing to do anymore. I want to protect Sophie and keep her safe, but what good is safety if she has to grow up in a world where people disappear without a trace because they pray to a different God?
From now on, she was Juliette Gervaise, code name the Nightingale.
Bitterness would do you good. All that smiling and pretending of yours would give me hives.
In Alaska you can make one mistake. One. The second one will kill you.
What did she wish? She didn’t know. When she thought about it, that was the problem with her life, now and always, she’d never known what to wish for until it was too late.
I have spent a lifetime running from it, trying to forget, but now I see what a waste all that was. Antoine was Julien’s father in every way that mattered. It is not biology that determines fatherhood. It is love.
How could any woman know her own story until she knew her mother’s?
In the last few moments before dawn, Vianne sat near the mound of fresh-turned earth. She wanted to pray, but her faith felt far away, the remnant of another woman’s life.
Even more important than what she gave her garden was what it gave her. In it, she found a sense of calm.
Fear and shame she understood. Fear made you run and hide and shame made you stay quiet, but this anger wanted something else. Release.