The Peach Keeper

Happiness is a risk. If you’re not a little scared, then you’re not doing it right.

Every life needs a little space. It leaves room for good things to enter it.

People always say life is too short for regrets. But the truth is, it's too long.

We're connected, as women. It's like a spiderweb. If one part of that web vibrates, if there's trouble, we all know it, but most of the time we're just too scared, or selfish, or insecure to help. But if we don't help each other, who will?

Why were girls in such a hurry to grow up? Agatha would never understand. Childhood was magical. Leaving it behind was a magnificent loss.

Coffee, she'd discovered, was tied to all sorts of memories, different for each person. Sunday mornings, friendly get-togethers, a favorite grandfather long since gone, the AA meeting that saved their life. Coffee meant something to people. Most found their lives were miserable without it. Coffee was a lot like love that way. And because Rachel believed in love, she believed in coffee, too.

Her grandmother used to tell her that a pink sky meant someone in the distance had just fallen in love . . . .

People adapt. People change. You can grow where you're planted.

There was a strange but universal understanding among women. On some level all women knew, they all understood, the fear of being outnumbered, of being helpless. It throbbed in their chests when they thought about the times they left stores and were followed. The knocks on their car windows as they were sitting alone at red lights, and strangers asking for rides. Having too much to drink and losing their ability to be forceful enough to just say no. Smiling at strange men coming on to them, not wanting to hurt their feelings, not wanting to make a scene. All women remembered these things, even if they had never happened to them personally. It was a part of their collective unconscious.

People fall in love all the time. And it's not always with the right people. And it's not always reciprocated.

If anyone had been paying attention to the signs, they would have realized that air turns white when things are about to change, that paper cuts mean there's more to what's written on the page than meets the eye, and that birds are always out to protect you from things you don't see.

When you're a teenager, your friends are your life. When you grow up, friendships seem to get pushed further and further back, until it seems like a luxury, a frivolity, like a bubble bath.

That's the fairy tale. You meet, you fall in love, you kiss, and neither of you is revolted by it. You get married and have kids and live happily ever after.

She never thought she was good at making friends. But maybe she was just trying to be friends with the wrong people.

Whenever I would get too nosy as a child, my grandmother would say, "When you learn someone else's secret, your own secrets aren't safe. Dig up one, release them all.

That, they knew, was true friendship. And they knew, if you're lucky enough to find it, you hold on to it.

Watching them, she realized they made so much sense together. Every look, every touch, was a reassurance, almost electric, as if they were shocking each other with every contact.

How can we know the true meaning of charity if we don't even know how to help those closest to us?

Those who decided to stick with her would be her true friends. The others would just be scenery.

Right now everyone is drinking bad wine made of sour grapes and hysteria. Let them drink it, and let them regret it in the morning.

How could someone with a life this full feel this empty?

But one thing she [Rachel] did believe in was love. She believed that you could smell it, that you could taste it, that it could change the entire course of your life.

She knew what it felt like to stand in front of someone and ask them to love you, to try to pull them to you by the sheer force of your desire, a force so strong it felt as though you were going to die from it.

He didn't think he belonged here, so she was making him face some uncomfortable facts. People adapt. People change. You can grow where you're planted.

Her life was monotonous, but it kept her out of trouble. . . . This, her father would say, was called being an adult.

Wasn't that the point to being married? That you had a partner, someone you trusted, to help with important decisions.

Because he knew the best way to get what he wanted was to break down what made us strongest. And our friendships were what made us strong.

I've never seen you hide from anyone before. He must do something crazy to you.

Superstitions are man's way of trying to control things he has no control over...