Sometimes when the wind blows through the leaves, it sounds like your name. It’s like a sigh then. The most beautiful sound I ever heard. A gentle breeze catches in the branches then and I hear it, soft and low, a murmured prayer – Gem-ma, Gem-ma – and then the leaves trail delicate fingers across my cold cheeks.
The land is old, the land is vast, he has no future, he has no past, his coat is sewn with many woes, he’ll bring the dead, the King of Crows.
Could you look again, please?” the woman asked in a clipped, slightly British accent. “It was sent parcel post two weeks ago from Miss Felicity Worthington and addressed to Mrs. Rao, Mrs. Gemma Doyle Rao.
It was funny how one afternoon with a best friend could set a girl right.
Besides, things you loved deeply could be lost in a second, and then there was no filling the hole left inside you. So she lived in the moment, as if her life were one long party that never had to stop as long as she kept the good times going.
Stories were power. And whoever controlled the story controlled everything. A story could bring people together, or it could tear them apart. It could spread like a sickness, infecting people. It could lead them into battle or shake them into seeing what they had refused to see before.
But isn’t that strange and wonderful unpredictability part of humanity? Aren’t all of our differences what already make us a great nation?
For dreams, too, are ghosts, desires chased in sleep, gone by morning. The longing of dreams draws the dead, and this city holds many dreams.
Because I’m not enough, she thought. That was the terrible echo shouting up at her: Fraud, fraud, fraud. She got drunk and talked too much and danced on tables. She had a temper and a sharp tongue, and she often blurted out things she instantly regretted. Worst of all, she suspected that was who she truly was – not so much a bright young thing as a messy young thing.
I’ll be counting the cats when I come over. There better be the same number each time.
I’ve learned that feminism is for everybody and there’s nothing wrong with taking up space in the world, even if you have to fight for it a little bit, and that if you don’t feel like smiling or waving, that’s okay. You don’t have to, and you don’t have to say sorry. Mostly, I’ve learned that I don’t really care if you like these answers or not, because they’re the best, most honest ones I’ve got, and I just don’t feel like I can cheat myself enough to give you what you want me to say.
This is how it is now. There is strength in acceptance, Ling. Your legs have been taken from you. But how you choose to live with that has not.
I mean that she was complicated. Everybody is,” Ling said quietly. “Don’t erase her like that. She deserves better.
It’s over, her mind whispered. There’s still hope, her heart insisted.
But if you abandoned the idea that such a paradise awaited you, and believed that you would live this life over and over again, would you not live the life you had more thoughtfully?
Idealism is just an escape from reality. There is no utopia.
People you loved could be gone in a breath. So why didn’t knowing that make it any easier to be vulnerable? To tell people that you loved them, that you were hurting, that you were afraid, or that, sometimes, at five in the morning, you were so alone in your own skin that you watched the weak light play across the ceiling, willing it toward dawn?
Evie was still crying and so didn’t know what Sam whispered to Theta over the top of her head. She only knew that now there were two sets of arms around her, holding her close, holding her up. She only knew that she had family after all.
You must work always to understand your own heart so that it cannot be used against you.
There is no greater power on this earth than story. People think boundaries and borders build nations. Nonsense – words do.