Do you ever just put your arms out and just spin and spin and spin? Well, that’s what love is like; everything inside of you tells you to stop before you fall, but for some reason you just keep going.
When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure.
When I walk, I walk with you. Where I go, you’re with me always.
…he had a way of taking your hand which made it clear he’d have to be the one to let go.”From Alice Hoffman’s “Local Girls”, pg.102.
Sometimes the right thing feels all wrong until it is over and done with.
Unrequited love is so boring. Weeping under a blue-black sky is for suckers or maniacs.
Still anyone who trusts a serpent deserves its bite. The wise see a creature for what it is, not what it says it may be.
My mother was teaching me that the inside of something was not necessarily its outside. Always look carefully, she told me. Look with more than your eyes.
But what we are given is taken as well, so that we know God’s glory comes to us from His will alone.
We are only an instant, that’s true. But we are eternal.
But in battle you cannot tell another when it is his time to enter the World-to-Come, nor is it possible to keep any man in this world when he wishes to leave it behind.
You can get addicted to trouble if you’re not careful.
Pride is a funny thing it can make what is truly worthless appear to be a treasure.
Still, she knows one thing for certain: never judge a relationship unless you are the one wrapped up in its arms.
He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.
Shelby watched the books burn. She wonders if words are pouring down on other people’s houses,sad words, like beast and mourn and sorrow and mother.
Our rest is formed by our waking life and our waking life is formed by our sorrows.
Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were. Butterflies for instance, and women who’ve been in love with the wrong man too often.
It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you feel beautiful too.
From the time I could read, I found solace in my father’s library…At the ages of ten and eleven and twelve I would have preferred to remain in the library…
Perhaps I was drawn to stories in which people found their true desires because I was a stranger to myself.
Because we were Russian, sadness came naturally to us. But so did reading. In my family, a book was a life raft.
He wanted pain, I saw that in him, and what a man wants he will often manage to find.
Pain was something to get used to, to inure yourself against. I would rather hurt myself than be hurt by someone else, and so I took up this practice with a sense of purpose and without remorse.
He carried so much suffering that it radiated out in waves. Sorrow is like that: whenever a person runs, it comes after him; it leaves an endless trail of pain.
Love was never a mistake,even when it wasn’t returned.
I’m trying to find someone who doesn’t want to be found.””That can be as hard as looking for a shadow.
He was withdrawing. I think it was getting harder for him to accept his fate. Like a bird in a cage, he grew silent.
I head a bitterness that hadn’t been there before. Something was changing inside him. He’d had enough of following the rules.
It’s still horrible to wish the worst on anyone. I’m sure she had her reasons. Maybe people hurt her feelings, the same way I was hurt. A single word can feel like a rock being thrown at you.
She didn’t like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she’d been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.
She can feel his blood, just beneath his skin; when he breathes, the air fills with smoke. He’s like a dragon, ancient and fearless.
Every man engaged in war tells himself he can alter what has been written, that it is he, not God, who is the maker of destiny, free to change what is meant to be.
…never to rush something I was creating, but instead let it come into being as if it had a soul of it’s own.
Although I am no longer caught in the past, the future seems like a ridiculous thing to me. Try to catch it, hold it in your hand. It disappears every time.
I saw this was the way of the future, to leave the past behind as if it were a dream.
… the past was what we carried with us, threaded to the future, and we decided whether to keep it close or let it go.
… a man always revealed his own inner story in his actions and expressions. A man’s past deeds foretold his future and allowed anyone with half a brain to divine the path he would take.
There is the outside of a story, and the inside of a story… One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed.
There is no fiercer enemy than a word. A word that can be written down in pages and punctuated by quotation marks and commas and spelled out in contracts and poems and sighs, in old whispers and song lyrics, in promises and vows.
People expected certain things of me: assistance, silence, comfort. They had no idea who I was.
But now I understood that, although words were God’s first creation, silence was closer to His divine spirit, and that prayers given in silence were infinitely greater than the thousands of words men might offer up to heaven.
The stars are reflected from within the black water in the cistern. I find comfort in the omen I glean from this: light in the darkness, truth when it seems there is none.
That was the sorrow of it. He saw the light but never expected the darkness.
My grief was cold. It was nothing to share. It was nothing to speak about, nothing to feel.
I KNEW I MUST do all as I was told, yet something burned inside me, a seed of defiance that must have derived from a long-ago ancestor. Perhaps my mind was inflamed from the books I had read and the worlds I had imagined.
Interesting, but she could see that the boy didn’t have a single lie in him. A very rare condition, especially for the male of the species.
Every problem has a solution, although it may not be the outcome that was originally hoped for or expected.
I loved him even now, as he took a knife to my throat, as I drowned in blood, as I whispered “Cousin, you were wrong. We were born to live.
I knew what it was to yearn for a life so distant it seemed that it had never been anything more than a dream.
…early on Monday evening, when the sky was the color of a velvet ribbon falling over the hills.
Someone killed himself because of me once, Meredith said.People kill themselves because of what’s inside of them, not because of other people.
I must keep my head and not give in to desire, for desire is what causes women to drown.
what was a rose but the living proof of desire, the single best evidence of human longing and earthly devotion. but desire could be twisted,after all, and Jealousy was the name of the rose that did well in arid souls.
Before she can stop herself, she thinks about desire, how it lives within you and yet is separate, surfacing when it chooses, without permission, in the harsh afternoon light, at the moment when you least expect to find it.
He knew even at an early age of seven, how dangerous it was for someone like him to have hope. He knows how to have no expectations. He can completely control not just what he wants, but what he needs
Certain things need not be said, and there’s nothing, not a whisper, prayer, not a sacrifice, not a payment of any price, that would change what’s about to happen.
I understood that fate could not be eluded forever; it came on leathery wings, swooping through the darkness like the bats in the orchards.
I cast myself at him, like a fool, but he didn’t see me. And then one day he noticed I was beautiful and he wanted me. He broke me off and took me with him, in his hands, and I didn’t care that I was dying until I actually was.
That just goes to show that you never can tell about a person by guessing,” Frances informs her niece. “That’s why language was invented. Otherwise, we’d all be like dogs, sniffing each other to find out where we stood.
Feelings are best left concealed. They can bite you if you’re not careful. They can eat you alive.
Although she’d never believe it, those lines in Gillian’s face are the most beautiful part about her. They reveal what she’s gone through and what she’s survived and who exactly she is, deep inside.
You want me to lie to you?” said McKay. I shrugged. Why not? I didn’t mind lies.
Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen.
The voice that arises out of the silence is something no one can imagine until it is heard. It roars when it speaks, it lies to you and convinces you, it steals from you and leaves you without a single word of comfort.
Even as a small child, I understood that woman had secrets, and that some of these were only to be told to daughters. In this way we were bound together for eternity.
Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.
The story became a cloud, and the cloud a sheet of rain, and rain fell throughout the empire.
I want the difficult stories, the ones that aren’t easy to believe, the twisted ones, the sorrowful ones, the ones that need telling most of all.
But I was not a mouse. In the fields where I walked, I was much more interested in the actions of the hawks.
In a novel, you’ll find yourself in a world of possibilities. You’ll find shelter there.
They sealed this promise by hooking pinkies, the way they used to, long ago, when promises didn’t hurt as much.
You want to know what love is? Its the thing that ruins you.
There seemed to be handfuls of stars tossed right above the rooftops in Haddan, keeping the town still alight at midnight.
I knew what happened in fairy tales. The strong survived while the weak were eaten alive.
She has an eye for tragedy and sorrow. Show her a rose and she’ll see only the wasp in the center of the bloom.
Your sorrow will become smaller, like a star in the daylight that you can’t even see. It’s there, shining, but there is also a vast expanse of blue sky.
Time wasn’t the same anymore. Doors were slamming shut before we even knew they’d been opened. Good fortune can take forever to get to you, but as it turns out, sorrow is as quick as a shot.
I wrote Seventh Heaven for my mother who I miss eve
The sky is already purple; the first few stars have appeared, suddenly, as if someone had thrown a handful of silver across the edge of the world.
Such was the case with most unhappy students; they avoided even one another, so intent on their own unhappiness they failed to notice the other lost souls around them.
She thinks of the way angels arrive, when you lease expect them, when the road is dark, when you’re bleeding and alone and hopeless, when you’re sleeping in a basement, convinced that no one knows you’re there.
It had made her too helpless, because that’s what love did. There was no way around it and no way to fight it. Now if she lost, she lost everything.
You should never trust a liar so you should never trust a man of honor. Those two are the worst of mankind.
She understood love. What destroys you saves you, she had told me.
Sam said, Hey, you want to get high? Amy had taken his words to mean You are so beautiful I am undone by you.
I wasn’t good company, that was true, and people avoided me, but that was all right. I was too busy dreaming.
I knew the power of a single wish, after all. Invisible and inevitable, like a butterfly that beats its wings in one corner of the globe and with that single action changes the weather halfway across the world.
What was a demon but a lost soul, one that had been forced to use his skills to survive.
Demons were said to be cruel, but a demon would never have been so brutal as this. A demon merely called you by name, threw his arms around you, whispered his plight, understood yours, then took you for his own.
Here’s the thing about luck…you don’t know if it’s good or bad until you have some perspective.
I only had access to him when we were together in the library, and I loved them both -the library and my father- equally and without question.
Crying wasn’t like riding a bike. Give it up, and you quickly forget how it’s done.
In good time every secret must be shared and every miracle called into question.
I thought he knew me better than most…Then one nigh Jack brought me flowers, a handful of fading daisies he’d picked up at a farm stand, but flowers all the same. That was the end; that was how he ruined everything.
Do people choose the art that inspires them — do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller.
[Eddie] wondered if every criminal saw himself as the hero of his own story and if every thankless son was convinced he’d been mistreated by his father.
…and so many orchards circled the village that on some crisp October afternoons the whole wold smelled like pie.
Although my father had never been there, I came to believe I would someday see that city for him.
All the characters in my books are imagined, but all have a bit of who I am in them – much like the characters in your dreams are all formed by who you are.
I think growing up is difficult and it’s a process that I’m always interested in, with kids and adults, they are often on two different universes.
Mothers always find ways to fit in the work – but then when you’re working, you feel that you should be spending time with your children and then when you’re with your children, you’re thinking about working.