This is one of those things that you can never explain to anyone; that's what I want to explain - one of those free-association moments with connections that dissolve when you start to try to put them into words.
I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.
The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.
I'm tired of carrying around the weight of the world. I'm just going to lay it down now. It's my time to die, and it's your time to live. Don't mess it up.
We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with peanuts. Isn't that a shame we don't have many more ways to say it?
Clara Winter," he said. "You are a word person and don't ever forget it." He was right. He knew. He could tell. It's something that can be sensed. There's a difference between word-people and non-word-people.
There's been a lot to get used to here." Esther laughed. "Isn't that the truth. I don't know if you ever get used to it really. It just gets in your blood so that you can't stand to be anywhere else.
Owls hoot in B flat, cuckoos in D, but the water ousel sings in the voice of the stream. She builds her nest back of the waterfalls so the water is a lullaby to the little ones. Must be where they learn it.
He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.
The early settlers amazed her--they had pluck, they led lives of sweaty drama. Theirs was a world of corsets and whipping posts and indentured servitude. People worked the land and died in ungainly ways. Modern life, in comparison, seemed a cinch.
Everyone grieves in different ways. For some, it could take longer or shorter. I do know it never disappears. An ember still smolders inside me. Most days, I don’t notice it, but, out of the blue, it’ll flare to life.
[Janco] paused. His eyes held a distant gleam as if seeing into his past. 'My first practice was a shock. I was a cocky smart aleck--' [Opal] 'Was?' [J] 'Be quiet. I'm telling a story here.
Among other things, neuroplasticity means that emotions such as happiness and compassion can be cultivated in much the same way that a person can learn through repetition to play golf and basketball or master a musical instrument, and that such pract...
It seemed to Rosa Lublin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life. Here they had nothing. They were all scarecrows, blown about under the murdering sunball with empty ribcages.
Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plie, eleve, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.
I do believe in fate, Anne-not the blind fate that gives one no freedom of choice, but a fate that sets down a pattern for each of our lives and gives us choices, numerous choices, by which to find that pattern and be happy.
Shakespeare had all these sonnets where what he said came down to this: Youth is fleeting and you'd better get married and have children and make a copy of the beauty you own because the world owns it too.
For the first time I realized adults could back themselves into corners so remote that love, or its memory, could no longer reach them.
They'd had to empty their pockets and turn over Aunt Val's purse to the security guard. That way, I wouldn't be tempted to try to kill anyone with her lip gloss and her travel-size pack of tissues.
Time is cruel like life. It slows down so that you can truly experience the worst moments of it. Only if you make it through them do you get to say ‘It all happened so fast.
Character is beyond obligation. You could kick your shoes off at the door, flick your cigarete butts onto the sidewalk or talk only in slang, those things are forgivable if you have character
