Bean felt a rush of sweet nostalgia for the woman who had introduced us to E. Nesbit and Edward Eager and Laura Ingalls Wilder...
Clutter is not just physical stuff. It’s old ideas, toxic relationships and bad habits. Clutter is anything that does not support your better self.
Hurts and disappointments can hold gifts.
A highly cultivated taste, a taste that is knowledgeable and eclectic, is likely to be exciting and provocative, a personal taste at its highest level.
Your own Fear is the greatest obstacle you will ever face on your journey. Let your Faith be bigger than your Fear.
There is no problem a library card can’t solve.
Allow yourself to experience fully every step of the journey, both the joy and the pain. You’re alive. Greet the moment at hand with a grateful heart.
You may have lost your way more than a little bit, but I believe you can find your way back. That’s the trick. Finding your way back.
We wear our names heavily. And though we have tried to escape their influence, they have seeped into us, and we find ourselves living their patterns again and again.
Our destiny is in the way we were born, in the way we were raised, in the sum of the three of us.
She never managed to find herself in these books no matter how hard she tried, exhuming traits from between the pages and donning them for an hour, a day, a week. We think in some ways, we have all done this our whole lives, searching for the book that will give us the keys to ourselves, let us into a wholly formed personality as though it were a furnished room to let. As though we could walk in and look around and say to the gray-haired landlady behind us, “We’ll take it.
This conversation, you will not be surprised to know, was the impetus for their breakup, given that it caused her to realize the emotion that she had thought was her not liking him very much was, in fact, her not liking him at all. Because despite his money and his looks and all the good-on-paper attributes he possessed, he was not a reader, and, well, let’s just say that is the sort of nonsense up with which we will not put.
Imagine what could happen if we all had the heart to be who we truly are.
We came home because we were failures. We wouldn’t admit that, of course, not at first, not to ourselves, and certainly not to anyone else. We said we came home because our mother was ill, because we needed a break, a momentary pause before setting off for the Next Big Thing. But the truth was, we had failed, and rather than let anyone else know, we crafted careful excuses and alibis, and wrapped them around ourselves like a cloak to keep out the cold truth. The first stage: denial.
How different her mother’s world was from hers. How different our mothers’ worlds are from all of ours.
We were fairly certain that if anyone made public the various and variegated ways in which being an adult sucked eggs, more people might opt out entirely.
Sleeping was impossible, and we would often be found wandering the house, our white nightgowns gleaming in the darkness, a trio of Lady Macbeths, driven mad by the mercury.
They seemed to be accomplished... all of them doing something brave and new, making space for themselves without waiting for an invitation pg. 158-9.
There were so many things that were not all right with Phillip, and even more things that were not all right with Phillip and me. And perhaps an even longer list of things that were not all right eith me individually.
You might think that it was Rose who had the strongest moral compass of all of us, but we believe that this is actually Cordy’s gift. Rose’s beliefs are cold and hard, and suffer no sympathy for humanity. But Cordy both knows right from wrong and understands that they are not inflexible ideals, that people compromise for the sake of war, and love, and pain, and that they are simply doing what they must.
You only have one life to live. Make sure its yours.