The Bookshop at Water's End

Sometimes we tell our stories and sometimes our stories tell us.

We all do the very best we can.” There was forgiveness in this admission. We were all doing the very best we could: as women, as mothers and as daughters. We hurt each other; we heal each other; we mend and we break and we try again, until we can’t and the headstone has its final say. And yet still our hearts reach out for both love and forgiveness, granted and accepted.

We do what we can with what we know at the time, and with what we believe.

Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you. —Hafez

Maybe that was all that mattered, not the untangling, not the fixing, not the “figuring it out,” but the love itself.

Every small and lovely thing. Maybe that should always be enough. If that is how she made her life, out of those things . . .

She did the best she could.

Hell is the absence of people you long for.

Look up from that phone. Maybe you won’t feel so brokenly special.

It wasn’t Lucas’s fault that he wanted me to be someone else. I’d pretended to be that someone else for a very long time.

We were all doing the very best we could: as women, as mothers and as daughters. We hurt each other; we heal each other; we mend and we break and we try again, until we can’t and the headstone has its final say. And yet still our hearts reach out for both love

But I was wrong, because you don’t know who you can be, or what you can do, until you have to be and do.

unless you knew the story inside the story

Art and stories,” I said, “offer meaning to our lives in a way nothing else can. Science can’t. Logic won’t. The soul needs story and meaning to help us endure this life.

peered around the room. “And we all have to do it at different times. But what no one ever tells you is that there is this horrible, gooey, mud-sucking, scary-as-hell middle place that you have to slog through before the begin-again gets to start.

you don’t know who you can be, or what you can do, until you have to be and do.

Inside the very worst things you can find the power for change. Nothing needs to be the end of it all; anything and everything can have new meaning.

Books may well be the only true magic. Alice Hoffman.

Sometimes the ocean makes me feel like everything is going to work out and be fine, and sometimes it makes me feel like the world is too, too big and nothing will ever be right because there’s too much of it all.

I couldn’t feel my teeth, which happened when I got stoned, but I could feel the hot sting of heartbreak.

Even as I knew what was happening—a panic attack—I couldn’t make it disappear. Knowing what it is doesn’t cure it.

I didn’t know yet. But I also knew better than to force it. That was where the worst of my art came from. Maybe the worst of life also.

There was forgiveness in this admission. We were all doing the very best we could: as women, as mothers and as daughters. We hurt each other; we heal each other; we mend and we break and we try again, until we can’t and the headstone has its final say. And yet still our hearts reach out for both love and forgiveness, granted and accepted.

daughter of the past who walked in all wide-eyed and exhaling like she’d finally found what she was looking for. It was a look I knew well. So glad to be in a cozy bookshop, in air-conditioned comfort, surrounded by stories, and to find that in the chaos of the world there was still a place like this. A place where books were piled to the ceiling and tables were crowded with the paraphernalia of reading: bookmarks, reading lights, stationery, pens and framed quotes to inspire.