Rain Valley newcomers pretty much fell into two groups: people running away from something and people running away from everything.
It’s not intentions that matter. It’s actions. We are what we do and say, not what we intend to.
Nothing was easier to shatter than the fragile shield of an idealist.
The heat made people crazy. They woke from their damp bedsheets and went in search of a glass of water, surprised to find that when their vision cleared, they were holding instead the gun they kept hidden in the bookcase.
Of course you can fall in love. You just have to let yourself. They don’t call it falling for nothing. -Kate.
At one point, she’d wanted to hurl the whole breakfast at the wall. And then she’d remember why it was that men had temper tantrums and women didn’t: cleanup.
Popularity means people think they know you.
I guess no one stays friends for more than thirty years without broken hearts along the way.
Hands down, the hardest part for me is coming up with an idea. I spend about 14 months writing a book, and that’s a lot of hours spent thinking about a single project. I simply have to love the idea. I’ll go through dozens of workable ideas until I find the one that lights my fire.
Thoughts – even fears – were airy things, formless until you made them solid with your voice and once given that weight, they could crush you.
And before you barrel through some idiotic Cosmo girl list of how-well-do-you-know-your-man questions, let me say that I don’t know squat about him except that he kisses like a god and screws like a devil.
What good did it do to light the world on fire if she had to watch the glow alone?
Before this trip and all that she’d learned about the three of them, she would have gotten angry or changed the subject. Anything to obscure the pain she felt. Now she knew better. You carried your pain with you in life. There was no outrunning it.
That was the one thing she knew now. Some chances came and went, and if you missed them, you could spend the rest of your life standing alone, waiting for an opportunity that had already passed you by.
She waited for you in a thousand different ways.
The at-home mother’s life: it was a race with no finish line.
Real friends. The kind that don’t purposely hurt your feelings or stop liking you for no reason.
Nina knew the power of black and white images. Sometimes a thing was its truest self when the colors were stripped away.
Alice started to cry. It came with no sound, no shuddering, no childlike hysterics, just a soul-deep release that turned into moisture and dripped down her puffy pink cheeks. She touched her tears, frowning. Then she looked up at Julia and whimpered two words before she fell asleep. ‘Real hurts.’
It was the Magic Hour, the moment in time when every leaf and blade of grass seemed to separate, when sunlight, burnished by the rain and softened by the coming night, gave the world an impossibly beautiful glow.
Liam learned that it was possible to appear to move forward when you were really standing still.