Every life needs a little space. It leaves room for good things to enter it.
We’re connected, as women. It’s like a spiderweb. If one part of that web vibrates, if there’s trouble, we all know it, but most of the time we’re just too scared, or selfish, or insecure to help. But if we don’t help each other, who will?
If a man has so much heat he burns your skin when he touches you, he’s the devil. Run away
People always say life is too short for regrets. But the truth is, it’s too long.
Sometimes you weren’t supposed to share pain. Sometimes it was best just to deal with it alone.
You’d be surprised how easy some things can be, things you never thought you’d do, when you take self-respect out of the equation.
Happiness is a risk. If you’re not a little scared, then you’re not doing it right.
I needed to stop being what everyone thought I was.
Stability was overrated. Crises and adventures, on the other hand, could actually teach you something.
Did I ever tell you about the day I finally let go of him? That day that led me to you?
But relying on one person for your every need is so dangerous. One set of hands isn’t enough to keep you from falling
It felt as though they were the only people in the world, two young women about to bury the symbol of their helplessness, as if that’s all it would take to make them whole again.
But that would leave Paxton to fend for herself, and the last thing any woman wanted in this kind of situation was to look around and see all the people who could help her doing nothing.
…Agatha had declared that her friendship to Georgie still existed, as if it was a living, breathing thing, something that came to life the moment it happened and didn’t just go away because they no longer acknowledged it.
Why were girls in such a hurry to grow up? Agatha would never understand. Childhood was magical. Leaving it behind was a magnificent loss.
She looked like autumn, when leaves turned and fruit ripened.
We decided to become a society of women, a club to make sure women were protected. The club was something important back then. Not like it is today.
It had always fascinated him that she’d consumed so many words, that her head was full of stories, told a thousand different ways.
Jack thought anyone who read couldn’t be all that bad.
The books I read when I was twenty completely changed when I read them when I was sixty.
He didn’t think he belonged here, so she was making him face some uncomfortable facts. People adapt. People change. You can grow where you’re planted.
Under her thick pancake makeup, her skin had been pockmarked, but he would stare at her adoringly from his cot at night and imagine her scars were constellations, a secret map to a far-off, happy place.
Under her thick pancake makeup, her sin had been pockmarked, but he would stare at her adoringly from his cot at night and imagine her scars were constellations, a secret map to a far-off, happy place.
To this day she could make tap water boil just by kissing him.
Yellow joy was radiating from her. When you’re happy for yourself, it fills you. When you’re happy for someone else, it pours over. It was almost too bright to watch.
You can’t change where you come from, but you can change where you go from here. Just like a book. If you don’t like the ending, you can make up a new one.
The word lethologica describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want.
Love always hurts. That’s one thing I know you know. But it’s worth it. That’s what you don’t know. Yet.
It was a remarkable realization to Eby, that we are what we’re taught. That was why the Morris women were what they were. It was because they knew no different.
He stared up at the moon, which looked like a giant hole in the sky, letting light through to the other side.
But she stopped herself. That wouldn’t make it right. You didn’t forgive because it was the only choice you thought you had. That didn’t make it forgiveness, that made it desperation. She’d always been too desperate about Jake. Always.
The air around her was cool lately, as if she were creating a vacuum with her unhappiness.
There was an art to the male posterior. That’s all there was to it.
Snow flurries began to fall and they swirled around people’s legs like house cats. It was magical, this snow globe world.
Like magic, she felt him getting nearer, felt it like a pull in the pit of her stomach. It felt like hunger but deeper, heavier. Like the best kind of expectation. Ice cream expectation. Chocolate expectation.
He stood there, glowing like the sun, and stared at her like she was the unbelievable one.
You can’t change where you came from, but you can change where you go from here.
Fate never promises to tell you everything up front. You aren’t always shown the path in life you’re supposed to take. But sometimes when you’re really lucky, you meet someone with a map.
Don’t be vain. What you look like doesn’t matter. It’s the deed that matters.
Sometimes it’s difficult to tell what side of the moral compass we are all on. There are so many things to factor in.
No one should ever compromise the dignity of another human being.
I know he’s a good baby… but the challenge is to raise him into a good boy, then a good man.
There’s not a lot I can fix for her anymore. Band-Aid and bedtime story days are almost over. This, I can fix with a simple Welcome.
Whenever I would get too nosy as a child, my grandmother would say, “When you learn someone else’s secret, your own secrets aren’t safe. Dig up one, release them all.
Bay remembered the Waverley house full of pumpkin pie scents in the fall. There had been mountains of maple cakes with violets hidden inside, lakes of butternut soups with chrysanthemum petals floating on top.
People like us will never really understand, Evanelle said. We fell in love with the men we were supposed to be with right off the bat. But women with broken hearts, they change.
You can’t change where you came from, but you can change where you go from here. Just like a book. If you don’t like the ending, you make up a new one.
But she couldn’t start this, because then it would end. Stories like this always ended. She couldn’t take this pleasure, because she would spend the rest of her life missing it, hurting from it.
He claimed the waters must have, indeed, been healing, because look how hard his journey was on him to get there, and how easy it was on him to get home.
Warm, enticing scents were floating down, basil and oregano and tomato. It made Wes long for something, something he couldn’t place. A happy childhood, a home.
Adolescence is like having only enough light to see the step directly in front of you.
But Claire had long ago realized, even after those constant dreams of her mother leaving faded away, that when you are abandoned as a child, you are never able to forget that people are capable of leaving, even if they never do.
She knew him in that way you can only know a person as a child. Like if you cracked away the adult shell, you’d find that child, happily sitting inside, smiling at you.
To Fred, those years seemed to pass like quickly skimming a book and then finding the ending wasn’t what he expected. He wished he’d paid more attention to the story.
Motherhood is hard enough without judgement from others who don’t know the whole story.
Motherhood, true motherhood, was what went on when no one else could see.
Life is about experience… You can’t hold on to everything
It was like the way you wanted sunshine on Saturdays, or pancakes for breakfast. They just made you feel good.
When you have to do something, you have to do it. Putting it off only makes it worse. Believe me, I know.
She did know that it’s remarkably easy to fall in love with someone who is already in love with you. It’s a little like falling in love with yourself.
Those stories were the sound track of my summer with you.
Summer was a lady who didn’t give up her spotlight easily.
There was a sense of tightness in the room now, filling the space. Attraction was like that. It filled. It poured into you like batter into a pan, sticking to the sides.
It looked like the world was covered in a cobbler crust of brown sugar and cinnamon.
I was just telling Claire about a guy I met in bread class. I hate him, but he could be my soul mate.
Some of Bay’s fondest memories were of lying under the apple tree in the summer while Claire gardened and the apple tree tossed apples at her like a dog trying to coax its owner into playing catch.
Once he’d asked, “Don’t you want to read? There are hundreds of books in the sitting room.”She had laughed and said, “I’ve read them all. I want to remember them the way they were. If I read them now, the endings will have changed.
Who I am, what I am, is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of stories. And there are still so many more books to read. I’m a work in progress.
My favorite books are the ones that make me smile for hours after reading them. I want that for my readers, for the sweetness to linger. Sort of like chocolate, but without the calories.