“When I first learned that Paul had been killed, the grief had been all-consuming, and I didn’t think I would be able to go on. Yet life continues to move forward, and so have I, dragging from one day into the next until I found I could breathe normally.”
“I was looking forward to my visit to the library. I’ve always been a big reader and thought I might eventually volunteer as a Friend of the Library.”
“Still, I remained curious. Abby Kincaid had flown in from Florida, which was about as far away from Cedar Cove as a person could get while remaining in the continental United States. She appeared to be happy for her brother and his bride, but she didn’t seem pleased to be in town. She’d mentioned that it’d been over ten years since she was last in Cedar Cove, but surely there were school friends she’d want to see.”
“love. “In time you’ll know joy again.” Joy? I wanted to argue with him. It didn’t seem likely or even possible. One doesn’t heal from this kind of pain. I remembered how my family and friends had struggled to find the right words to comfort me. But there are no words … there simply are no words.”
“perhaps, in giving of myself, I would find the joy Paul had promised. And maybe, given time, it would be possible for me to find my way back to life.”
“After all, it wan't every day that someone got adopted by a dog.”
“Black is a girl's best friend.”
“Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.”
“The mirror reflects perfectly; it makes no mistakes because it doesn't think. To think is to make mistakes.”
“Lana. I think about you every minute of every day. When I'm with you, my world is complete. When I touch you, I understand the meaning of life. When I lost you, I completely shattered. You. Own. Me.”
“I was dying, of course, but then we all are. Every day, in perfect increments, I was dying of loss.
The only help for my condition, then as now, is that I refused to let go of what I loved. I wrote everything down, at first in choppy fragments; a sentence here, a few words there, it was the most I could handle at the time. Later I wrote more, my grief muffled but not eased by the passage of time.
When I go back over my writing now I can barely read it. The happiness is the worst. Some days I can't bring myself to remember. But I will not relinquish a single detail of the past. What remains of my life depends on what happened six years ago.
In my brain, in my limbs, in my dreams, it is still happening.”
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