The Shape of Mercy

When you only do what is expected of you, you never learn what you would've done had you chosen for yourself.

I used to think mercy meant showing kindness to someone who didn't deserve it, as if only the recipient defined the act. The girl in between has learned that mercy is defined by its giver. Our flaws are obvious, yet we are loved and able to love, if we choose, because there is that bit of the divine still smoldering in us.

I don't know very many people who can piece together eloquent prayers when their souls are wounded. Words don't come at those times, but tears do. I have always thought of my tears as prayers.

I smiled. "I just wish... I wish I didn't judge people by what they have or don't have. I wish I could see people for you they are on the inside before I come to any conclusions." My dad blinked slowly and then said... "Yes, that would be better than the other, but it still makes you their judge.

Dissecting a book was the same as making sense of life. You have to find a way to interpret life, or you'll go nuts.

We understand what we want to understand.

We are born knowing how to be just. And we die knowing we spent a lifetime pretending we didn't.

Our flaws are obvious, yet we are loved and able to love, if we choose, because there is that bit of the divine still smoldering in us.

Papa said marriage is not kept by affection but by a pledge. Affection does not beget the pledge; the pledge begets the affection. When you share a life and a home and a bed with someone, you become soul mates as surely as cream and effort produce butter....And so I began to imagine my life with James Luddy. I imagined being butter.

He speaks of Satan as though the Devil is God’s equal instead of a mere created being. God could whisper Satan out of existence with a word. Surely Rev. Parris knows this.

How does anybody convince anybody else of anything? You catch them at a weak moment, when they’re feeling alone or afraid, and you offer them the security of solidarity. Advertising execs use this tactic all the time: Buy this and be like everyone else. Don’t buy it and be the loser no one respects.” “So I guess the key is to never let yourself feel alone or afraid.” “No,” he responded. “The key

the remembered fear that someone can say something untrue about you and as long as there is someone else to believe it, you are whatever they say you are.

And I have found that the rich and the poor have a hugely significant characteristic in common. As do the accuser and the condemned, the loved and the unloved, the free and the bound. We each think we understand the other. We don’t.

...The primroses always come back. Even after a hard winter, they find a way to survive. They come back every spring.

We are both of us torn by the weight of knowing all these people cannot possibly be witches. If we speak in their defense, we become accused. If we say nothing, we condemn them falsely with our silence. What would God have us do?

The key is to never let someone else tell you what to think.

...I don't want my destiny handed to me. I want to choose it.

The frail letters on the first page were barely legible; they looked like whispers, if whispers had form.

Confidence tends to minimize the magnitude of the choice.

People who are free to choose will choose the best use for whatever it is they possess. Wealth and prosperity begin with the freedom to choose.

They aren't afraid to take risks, but they don't gamble. They are generous but not extravagant. They thrive on beauty of economics, the fact that it is both art and science.

We moved wordlessly from one room to another, from the room of the dead to the room where time lay in pages everywhere I looked.