Winter Garden

We women make choices for others, not for ourselves, and when we are mothers, we...bear what we must for our children. You will protect them. It will hurt you; it will hurt them. Your job is to hide that your heart is breaking and do what they need you to do.

They would always be a family, but if she'd learned anything in the past few weeks it was that a family wasn't a static thing. There were always changes going on. Like with continents, sometimes the changes were invisible and underground, and sometimes they were explosive and deadly. The trick was to keep your balance. You couldn't control the direction of your family any more than you could stop the continental shelf from breaking apart. All you could do was hold on for the ride.

To lose love is a terrible thing. But to turn away from it is unbearable. Will you spend the rest of your life replaying it in your head? Wondering if you walked away too soon or too easily? Or if you'll ever love anyone that deeply again?

To those who are here, those who are gone, and those who are lost.

Before this trip and all that she'd learned about the three of them, she would have gotten angry or changed the subject. Anything to obscure the pain she felt. Now she knew better. You carried your pain with you in life. There was no outrunning it.

It is a kiss that, once begun, never really ends. Interrupted, yes. Paused, certainly. But from that very moment onward, Vera sees the whole of her life as only a breath away from kissing him again. On that night in the park, they begin the delicate task of binding their souls together, creating a whole comprising their separate halves.

Nina stared at the woman who had raised her and saw the truth at last. Her mother was a lioness. A warrior. A woman who’d chosen a life of hell for herself because she wanted to give up and didn’t know how. And with that small understanding came another, bigger one. Nina suddenly saw her own life in focus. All these years, she’d been traveling the world over, looking for her own truth in other woman’s lives. But it was here all along, at home with the one woman she’s never even tried to understand. No wonder Nina had never felt finished, never wanted to publish her photographs of the woman. Her quest had always been leading up to this moment, this understanding. She’s been hiding behind the camera, looking through the glass, trying to find herself. But how could she? How could any woman know her own story until she knew her mother’s?

I’m an insomniac lately. It’s one of the many prizes you find in the Cracker Jack box of a crumbling [relationship],

And maybe that was how it was supposed to be...Joy and sadness were part of the package; the trick, perhaps,was to let yourself feel all of it, but to hold on to the joy just a little more tightly...

Nina knew the power of black and white images. Sometimes a thing was its truest self when the colors were stripped away.

what shall we drink to?" "How about family?" Stacy said, showing up just in time to pour a fourth shot. "To those who are here, those who are gone, and those who are lost." and she clicked glasses with mom

I would not love him again. Not if I had known how it would feel to live with a broken heart.

I think maybe love can just...dissolve." "No, it does not," her mother said. "So how do--" "You hang on," her mother said. "Until your hands are bleeding, and still you do not let go.

Young has nothing to do with love. A woman can be a girl and still know her own heart.

He has been in her heart for so long it is as if she knows him already, but she doesn't. She does not know what to say or how to say it, and suddenly she is afraid that there is a wrong way to move forward, a mistake that once made cannot be undone.

Mislim da ljubav jednostavno može...nestati. Ne,ne može-rekla je njezina majka. Pa kako onda- Čvrsto je držiš...Sve dok ti ne prokrvare ruke,a ni tada je ne puštaš.

Možda je tako trebalo biti,možda se tako život razvijao ako živiš dovoljno dugo.Radost i tuga sastavni su dio paketa;trik je u tome da osjetiš sve,ali da se malo čvršće držiš radosti jer nikad ne znaš kad bi se snažno srce moglo ugasiti.

Ako je išta naučila od svega ovoga,onda je to da život-i ljubav-mogu nestati u sekundi.Ako ga imaš,trebaš ga se držati svom snagom i uživati u svakoj sekundi.

Every choice changed the road you were on and it was too easy to end up going in the wrong direction. Sometimes, settling down

Unaware of Nina, the woman paused at the riverbank and looked out over the scar on the land where the water should run. Her expression sharpened, turned desperate as she reached down to touch the child in her arms. It was a look Nina had seen in woman all over the world, especially in times of war and destruction. A bone-deep fear for her child’s future…Someday her portraits would show the world how strong and powerful women could be, as well as the personal cost of that strength… She heard Danny come up beside her. “Hey, you.” She leaned against him, feeling food about her shots. “I just love how they are with their kids, even when the odds are impossible. The only time I cry is when I see their faces with their babies. Why is that, with all we’ve seen?” “So it’s mothers you follow. I thought it was warriors.

You hang on,” her mother said. “Until your hands are bleeding, and still you do not let go.

sex could mean many things; one of them was good-bye.

They would always be a family, but if she'd learned anything in the past few weeks it was that a family wasn't a static thing. There were always changes going on. Like with continents, sometimes the changes were invisible and underground and sometimes they were explosive and deadly. The trick was to keep your balance. You couldn't control the direction of your family any more than you could stop the continental shelf from breaking apart. All you could do was hold on for the ride.

A salvo no está ningún secreto.

Le parecía que la veía como una especie de jarrón que pudiera romperse y volver a pegarse como si tal cosa, pero ella sabía que si pasaba lo peor, si se hacía añicos como de cristal, algunos fragmentos se perderían para siempre.

In rooms scented by dust, leather, and stone, she turns in the last of her father's dreams for her - that she will become a writer - she hands it in like an overdue book and takes joy in the words of others.

To be a great photographer you had to see first and feel later.