The Marriage of Opposites

Whoever knows you when you are young can look inside you and see the person you once were, and maybe still are at certain times.

My father had told me that no matter how comfortable we might feel, we must live like fish, unattached to any land. Wherever there was water, we would survive. Some fish could stay in the mud for months, even years, and when at last there was a high flooding tide, they would swim away, a dark flash, remembered only by their own kind. So perhaps the stories they told of our people were true: no net could hold us.

As I turned the pages, I felt as if there were bees on my fingertips, for I had never felt so alive as when reading.

Then I understood that when someone begins to tell you her story, you are entwined together. Perhaps even more so if the ending hasn’t been divulged.

I only had access to him when we were together in the library, and I loved them both -the library and my father- equally and without question.

You couldn’t see love, or touch it, or taste it, yet it could destroy you and leave you in the dark, chasing after your own destiny.

I knew what happened in fairy tales. The strong survived while the weak were eaten alive.

Then let us be among those who hope that the future will be less cruel than the past.

I KNEW I MUST do all as I was told, yet something burned inside me, a seed of defiance that must have derived from a long-ago ancestor. Perhaps my mind was inflamed from the books I had read and the worlds I had imagined.

But I was not a mouse. In the fields where I walked, I was much more interested in the actions of the hawks.

A woman who knows what she wants, Adelle always told me, is likely to receive it.

With every step I wished myself away to another life, one lived far from here.

There is the outside of a story, and there is the inside of a story, he told me as we sat in his library one afternoon. One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed.

I didn’t understand that when I closed myself to her, I took a part of her bitterness inside me. It was green and unforgiving, and as it grew it made me more like her. It gave me my strength, but it gave me my weakness as well.

werewolves were members of the old Danish families who owned slaves. Their transformation was God’s punishment for their wrongdoings. You could spy their teeth and claws at night, even when they were in their human guise, so they often wore gloves and scarves, even in the hottest times of the year.

Then I understood that when someone begins to tell you her story, you are entwined together. Perhaps even more so if the ending hasn't been divulged. It was exactly like dreaming the same dream, then waking too soon and never finding out what had happened.

My father told us that our people had been slaves in the desert and because God had seen fit to set us free, none among us should ever own another man. It had been written that every man belonged to God and no one else. But did women belong to God or to the men of their family? They could not own property or businesses; only their husbands could have that honor.

You lose people sometimes, you know. You don’t expect to, but then it happens and you can’t get them back.” We

... he discovered that the stars in the southern world were far brighter than any he had known, and that beneath the water there lived creatures so immense they created waves, as if they were masters of the ocean, and of the universe, and of fate.

he thought of Jesus as a great teacher, a rebel who refused to see the poor and disenfranchised mistreated.

Perhaps in the cold my heart would freeze and I would care nothing for those I was forced to abandon.

I had never felt so alive as when reading.

There is the outside of a story, and the inside of a story... One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed.

I hope you're happy," she said to Mrs. James. "Happiness is for fools." Helena James shrugged. "So I wish that for you.

From the time I could read, I found solace in my father's library...At the ages of ten and eleven and twelve I would have preferred to remain in the library...

After living with his art in my own chamber, I saw there was more than mere mimicry, and that art was a world unto itself, with its own symbols and language. A leaf seen in a certain light might be gray or violet as well as purple, and a latticework of twigs might easily turn red as the sky paled above the city.

Even now as the graves of these women went untended, and their passings unmourned, the seeds they had scattered turned the hillsides red and orange from May to September. Some called the pirates’ bounty flame trees, but to us they were known as flamboyant trees, for no one could ignore their glorious blooms, with flowers that were larger than a man’s open hand. Every time I saw them I thought of these lost women. That was what happened if you waited for love.

I had been blind to the pain of others until I had my own burden to carry.