Wolf Hollow

And I decided that there might be things I would never understand, no matter how hard I tried. Though try I would. And that there would be people who would never hear my one small voice, no matter what I had to say. But then a better thought occurred, and this was the one I carried away with me that day: If my life was to be just a single note in an endless symphony, how could I not sound it out for as long and as loudly as I could? (p228)

The year I turned twelve, I learned that what I said and what I did mattered. So much, sometimes, that I wasn't sure I wanted such a burden. But I took it anyway, and I carried it as best I could.

Our old barn taught me one of the most important lessons I was ever to learn: that the extraordinary can live in the simplest things" -Annabelle

But think about how it feels when your hands are so cold they go numb. How it's only when they start to thaw out that you realize how much they hurt.

But the wind always swept my words away like cloud shadows, as if it mattered more that I said them, than who heard them.

Anyone who's ever gone from warm and bright to cold and dark knows how I felt.

And that's when I felt the first wave of sorrow that came from keeping a new secret.

Somewhere, excitement waited for me like an uncut cake.

My father looked from my mother to me, his eyes full of questions. What should we do now? How are we supposed to know what to do now? I wasn't sure, either. But I knew I couldn't spend one more minute doing nothing. I knew I couldn't grow up and live a long life with the knowledge that I had not done what I could. Right now. Before it once again made no difference. (p 256) p265

Nothing less important in the eyes of God, Annabelle, than pretty.

All around us, birds woke up the sky.

I slept so long and hard that when my mother woke me the next morning I was a stranger to myself.

I didn't tell him that I'd put his awful stories in boxes and stacked them on a shelf at the back of my mind. I could hear a quieter version of them still, from their dark place, through all the other business that occupied my brain, but I wouldn't unlid those boxes until I was ready to hear [his] stories again as they wanted to be heard.

At times, I was so confused that I felt like the stem of a pinwheel surrounded by whir and clatter, but through that whole unsettling time I knew that it simply would not do to hide in the barn with a book and an apple and let events plunge forward without me.

We spent some time like that, me asking small questions, Toby giving me longer and longer answers, until we were simply talking, Toby asking me questions, too.

We girls in the 4-H club had made a flag to hang in the church, adding a blue star every time someone from the township went off to fight. When one of them died, we changed the blue star to a gold one. Just two, so far, but I had been to their funerals, and I knew there was no "just" about it.

Some of them would survive to become fruit as good as anything on earth. Others would wither on the branch, killed by frost, wasted.

To listen to the whisper in the back of my mind.

My name is Tobias Jordan. I am a carpenter from Maryland. And I did not push Betty down that well.

Sometimes things come out right," she said. "Sometimes they don't.

I had never known anyone quiet enough to approach a sleeping deer. Nor had I known any hungry man who would shoot one with a camera instead of a gun.

... And I could not help but to think of the hollow as a dark place, no matter how bright its canopy, no matter how pretty the flowers that grew in its capricious light. But Wolf Hollow was also where I learned to tell the truth in that year before I turned twelve: about things from which refuge was impossible. Wrong, even. No matter how tempting.

I wasn't sure, either. But I knew I couldn't spend one more minute doing nothing. I knew I couldn't grow up and live a long lief with the knowledge that I had not done what I could. Right now. Before it once again made no difference.

They were all big boys who were useful on their farms and didn’t see the point of going to a school that wouldn’t teach them to sow or reap or herd anything.

So much, sometimes, that I wasn’t sure I wanted such a burden.