In This Grave Hour

... truth has a certain buoyancy - it makes its way to the surface, in time.

Maisie bit her lip. She had learned that sometimes it was best to let words die of their own accord, rather than fight them.

Perhaps we shouldn't try to answer the questions now - let's just note them down. Maurice always said the power in a question is not in the answer, it's in the way the imagination gets busy when the question is at work.

You’re in pain, Mr. Miller—it has to come out somewhere. I’ve found that people in distress, either emotional or physical, often cannot help themselves—as if that which hurts has to be exorcised, and inflicting some sort of harm on another provides an immediate if temporary relief.

Just because the circumstances might be almost intolerable does not mean there are not moments when the light shines in.

Children, Maisie believed, could often only see their world in black and white, never shades of gray—which meant the hard-found forgiveness that provides respite from the dark melancholy of blame might never lift from the soul of a wounded child.

you have to move—go to another room, step out on a walk, or drive to a place fresh to you. Move yourself, and you move your mind. Look at the evidence from different angles.

She understood loss, understood how it could leach into every fiber of one's being; how it could dull the shine on a sunny day, and how it could replace happiness with doubt, giving rise to a lingering fear that good fortune might be snatched back at any time.

She had learned, long ago and in the intervening years when she was apart from all she loved, that to endure the most troubling times she had to break down time itself--one carefully crafted stitch after the other. If consideration of what the next hour might hold had been too difficult, then she thought only of another half and hour.

Come, take what you will, be nourished and know that you can bear what might be on your horizon, the good and the ill.” Now,