“There is how we
were before, and how we are now, and the time between is spent choosing
which doors to open, and which to close.”
“Adversity in life does not rob your heart of beauty. It simply teaches it a new song to sing.”
“We live, we love. These are the choices we are given, to open doors or to close them. It is all we have, and it is enough”
“Things do not always work out as we have planned, do they? Sometimes the hardest thing is not to just survive the grief, but to step around it and move on. It helps if your suitcases are not so full.”
“There are no completely good or bad people. Everybody makes mistakes, or bad choices. It's how we live with them that make us the people we are.”
“Time is a funny thing. It can take some people a whole lifetime before they realize they've been playing tug-of-war all by themselves.”
“I've found that you can't measure happiness the way you measure yards in a race. You just learn to recognize it when it arrives so you can enjoy it while it lasts.”
“It still amazed me sometimes when I caught sight of myself in a mirror. I would be startled to see the stranger there, as if still expecting to see my blond hair and tight skin, my hands with long, straight fingers. Age was a thief, an insidious one who instead of robbing you at night while you slept took all of your possessions one by one and forced you to watch.”
“There was so much we didn't know, so much we would never know. The secrets of the dead are always kept.”
“But maybe everybody was like that, all of us living the lives we had to while dreaming of the lives we wanted.”
“We all make choices, Miss Szarka. And if it doesn't work out the way we wanted it to, we can spend a lifetime blaming ourselves or blaming others. Either way, we've spent a lifetime blaming instead of a lifetime doing other things...I think the possibilities for second chances are everywhere if we just look hard enough." Eve”
“Sometimes hope is all we have, and to lose that is to lose all.”
“...hearing again the words from the Gullah woman, All shut-eye ain't sleep; all good-bye ain't gone.”
“Must take care of de root for to heal de tree.”
“The feelings I had for my sister were jumbled together, like the monkeys in a barrel game we'd had as children. All the brightly colored monkeys with their curved arms tangled and entwined, so convoluted that it was almost impossible to separate them.”
“I was starting to realize how much the presence of a child could make adults act more like adults.”
“...feelings of hurt and betrayal and utter loss poured through me like batter hitting a hot skillet.”
“Madame LaFleur would say that you're more of a classical ballet dancer instead of a jazz dancer. But sometimes all you have to do is change costumes to become something different.”
“It's good to be a little nervous. God compensates those with a lack of talent with an overabundance of self-confidence. -Gigi”
“Don’t see the notes. See the music. See the story it is telling you. Allow the music to change you. Allow it to give you the courage to do whatever you need to”
“is how we were before, and how we are now,”
“is how we were before, and how we are now, and the time between is spent choosing which doors to open, and which to close.”
“Everyone needed to be reminded of the person he or she had once hoped to be.”
“Two for the past. For the one we wish we had and for the one we have to live with.”
“Is that what happened as a mother grew older? She saw her children as adults she could confide in, despite how painful or revealing the subject matter? It seemed, almost, that because I was an adult I’d suddenly ceased to be her child.”
“When we look at a solid lump of iron or rock, we are 'really' looking at what is almost entirely empty space. It looks and feels solid and opaque because our sensory systems and brains find it convenient to treat it as solid and opaque. It is convenient for the brain to represent a rock as solid because we can't walk through it. 'Solid' is our way of experiencing things that we can't walk through or fall throug, because of the electromagnetic forces between atoms. 'Opaque' is the experience we have when light bounces off the surface of an object, and none of it goes through.”
“Her eyes narrowed, and her lips parted around a knowing laugh. "Oh. It's you."
"Pardon?" He was taken aback. "Do we know each other, lass?" He was quite certain they didn't; he could never have
forgotten this woman. The enticing manner in which her lips were currently pursed would have been seared into his
memory.
"The answer is no. I don't know you. But every other woman in this room does. Duncan Douglas, isn't it?" she said dryly.
Duncan studied her face. Although she was young-perhaps no more than twenty-she had a regal bearing beyond her years. "I do have some reputation with the lasses," he conceded, downplaying his prowess, confident of her impending maidenly swoon.
The look she gave him was far from admiring. He did a double take when he realized her gaze was downright disparaging.
"Not something I care for in a man," she said coolly. "Thank you for your offer, but I'd sooner dance with last week's rushes. They would be less used. Who wants what everyone else has already had?" The words were delivered
in a cool, modulated tone, shaped by an odd accent he couldn't place. Quite finished with him, she presented her
back and resumed talking to her companion.
Duncan was immobilized by shock.”
“For where shall a man turn who has no money? Where can he go? Wide, wide world, but as narrow as the coins in your hand. Like a tethered goat, so far and no farther. Only money can make the rope stretch, only money.”
“Neither of them noticed Jane for a moment, which was for the best, as Jane looked like parts of her had been ripped up and flung into the wind.
While Hunter smiled at Savannah, little pieces of Jane fluttered down to the parking lot. ...
She waded through the litter of her old self and climbed into the battered Taurus.”
“So could we please not mob the three-thousand-plus-year-old reaper like tweens at a boy-band concert?”
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