Like all motherless girls, Leni would become an emotional explorer, trying to uncover the lost part of her, the mother who carried and nurtured and loved her. Leni would become both mother and child; to her, mama would still grow and age. She would never be gone, not as long as Leni remembered her.
Instinctively, she lifted her camera and minimized her view of the world. It was how she managed her memories, how she processed the world. In pictures. With a camera, she could crop and re frame her life.
They are not lost. Nor are they in a better place. They are gone. As I approach the end of my years, I know that grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us.
It doesn’t hurt, it’s just my body. They can’t touch my soul.
She saw how love could be dangerous and beyond control. Ravenous.
Young has nothing to do with love. A woman can be a girl and still know her own heart.
And the books! She’d never seen so many. They whispered to her of unexplored worlds and unmet friends and she realized that she wasn’t alone in this new world. Her friends were here, spine out, waiting for her as they always had.
I love you,” he said against her lips. “I love you, too,” she said but the words that always seemed so big felt small now. What was love when put up against war?
All at once, it seemed, the leaves of cottonwood trees around the cabin turned golden and whispered to themselves, then curled into black flutes and floated to the ground in crispy, lacy heaps.
She knew what nightmares could do to a person and how bad memories could change who you were.
Why was it so easy for men in the world to do as they wanted and so difficult for women?
A broken heart hurts as badly in wartime as in peace.
Asking yourself a question, that’s how resistance begins. And then ask that very question to someone else. – REMCO CAMPERT.
They were trapped, by environment and finances, but mostly by the sick, twisted love that bound her parents together.
At my age, I should not be afraid of anything – certainly not my own past.
You don’t stop loving a person when they’re hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you.
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?
Antoine was Julien’s father in every way that mattered. It is not biology that determines fatherhood. It is love.
If love is a disease, I suppose I’m infected.
I can’t help smiling at that. He is such an American, this son of mine. He thinks one’s life can be distilled to a narrative that has a beginning and an end. He knows nothing about the kind of sacrifice that, once made, can never be either fully forgotten or fully borne. And how could he? I have protected him from all of that.