Jodi Lynn Anderson · 272 pages
Rating: (3.1K votes)
“Over the ten years since she'd been born, the trees of Briary Swamp, West Virginia, had peered through May's window night after night. They had watched over her thoughtful brown eyes, the imaginative crook of her head, the strong character of her knobby knees. The trees had laughed at the jokes May told her cat. Their leaves had whispered over her wild inventions, her colorful stories, her drawings.”
“The Lady shrugged nonchalantly. "You're a hider. Thats what you're thinking. And you're right."
May swallowed and nodded, feeling very small.
The Lady kneaded her wrinkled hands. "What you are hiding from the most, my dear, is that you are none of those things you are so afraid of being - cowardly, weak, small. You aren't afraid to know you're afraid. And you're most afraid that you're stronger than you know.”
“One by one they dissapeared Pumpkin last of all.
The last May saw of himwas his sad face under his waving tuft of hair and then his long fingers,reaching out toward her for a hug that would never happen now as they turned around the bend.”
“may
yes
can you carry me asked pumpkin
No ”
“Don't forget about the stardust. Don't forget about the quartz rocks in the woods. You are small. But you are also so much more.”
“Friends, she had realized, could make you do that. Forget the things that worried you most.”
“We are just stardust after all.”
“But the outsider in May, the one from Briery Swamp who had never fit quite right, kept her tucked safely in her nook.”
“She actually liked the idea that she might be made out of stars.”
“Others wonder, if the Bogey isn’t wearing his pants, who is?”
“That is what all creatures great and small are made of. Leftover stardust. An atom exploded, and all the dust became the planets, the stars...and us. That's all anything amounts to.”
“Our body’s evolutionary journey is also far from over. Natural selection didn’t stop when farming started but instead has continued and continues to adapt populations to changing diets, germs, and environments. Yet the rate and power of cultural evolution has vastly outpaced the rate and power of natural selection, and the bodies we inherited are still adapted to a significant extent to the various and diverse environmental conditions in which we evolved over millions of years. The end product of all that evolution is that we are big-brained, moderately fat bipeds who reproduce relatively rapidly but take a long time to mature.”
“We transmit and catch moods from each other in what amounts to a subterranean economy of the psyche in which some encounters are toxic, some nourishing.”
“Perhaps music is a sort of magic.”
“Incluso en esos días, los fotográfos de Geographic tenían fama por algo más que las fotografías. Como uno de ellos expresó recientemente, "me encantaría haber vivido la vida que la gente cree que he tenido". Si la dinámica imagen del fotográfo de Geographic parece exagerada en novelas, folclore y cine, bueno, su vida es todavía nada aburrida. Nuestros equipos fotográficos han sobrevivido a ataques de tiburones, ejércitos invasores, aviones estrellados y volcanes en erupción.”
“But for someone like me, who moved into an entirely different world when still quite young, it’s as if a deep gap divides my past and my present.”
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