Wondering how it was that one person's absence could rob the day so wholly of its shape and meaning.
He was a scribble of a man. 
She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people. 
Full of life and light; blissfully unaware of all the future had in store. 
Ah, well. Life's too short for moderation, wouldn't you say? 
As if I hadn't spent a lifetime pretending to forget. 
We are all victims of our human experience," Alice continued, "apt to view the present through the lens of our own past. 
It matters not, for she did not need her eyes to tell her who she was. She knew it by your love for her. 
I am not a storyteller ... not like the others. I only have one tale to tell. 
Even if she loathes it. To do so would be akin to denying the existence of an awkward child. 
I can't imagine facing the end of the day without a story to drop into on my way towards sleep. 
Reading is one of life's great pleasures; talking about books keeps their worlds alive for longer. 
The Latter, I can tell, is added for my benefit. An assumption that the elderly cannot help but be impressed by the old fashioned. 
People who'd led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances. 
Loeanneth, so greedy and bold. She wondered 
Poisons are more my thing 
...home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children. But whether tomorrow or years from now, I cannot guess. 
The ease I had come to expect with him had evaporated, replaced by awkwardness, a confusing tendency towards wrong turns and misunderstandings 
There was some part of me that never left that house. Rather, some part of the house that wouldn't leave me. 
shoes made soft, apologetic sounds. 
Make sure you write it all down, now. Everything you see and think and feel. Your voice is your own, it matters. 
Why did Hannah marry Teddy? Not because she loved him, but because she was prepared to love him. 
Youth is an arrogant place... 
The original fib was dreary enough, the additional biographical titbits positively inane. 
Boredom, as her mother had always told them, was a state to be pitied, the province of the witless. 
That was the nature of history, of course: notional, partial, unknowable, a record made by the victors. 
Better to lose oneself in action than to wither in despair. 
When I was small, I always hid to read. I couldn't shake the feeling that because reading was so pleasurable, it must somehow be illicit. 
I should think less of myself if no one disliked me. 
Love makes people do cruel things 
This was the power of the story weaver, Nell realized. An ability to conjure color so that all else seemed to fade. 
Because desperate people cling to hope like sailors to their wreaks. 
Sometimes 'feelings' aren't as airy-fairy as they seem. Sometimes they're just the product of observations we haven't realized we've been making. 
no matter how hard a person ran, no matter how fresh the start they gave themselves, the past had a way of reaching across the years to catch them. 
He would love her with a passion that both frightened and revived him, a desperation that made a mockery of his neat dreams for the future. 
There's a market for mysteries for adults. That feeling of opening a book and delving inside and not coming out until you've closed the book. 
Life could be cruel enough these days without the truth making it worse. 
Strange that in the day of tumult, it should be something so innocuous as a dribble of water that prompts a person to tears. 
ALL HOUSES have hearts; hearts that have loved, hearts that have billowed with contentment, hearts that have been broken. 
The stretch of years leaves none unmarked: the blissful sense of youthful invincibility peels away and responsibility brings its weight to bear. 
There was a lid for each pot, she'd told me often and soberly, and she thanked God she'd found her lid in my grandfather. 
Then lifted the book to my nose and breathed the ink in from its pages. The scent of possibilities. 
My thoughts swim. Back and forth, in and out, across the tides of history 
When reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge. 
As an only child, Cassandra found the well-worn paths of sibling interaction fascinating and horrifying in equal parts. 
They say everyone needs something to love. 
She had a way of speaking that eschewed intonation. It was a leveler, making the ordinary seem extraordinary and vice versa. 
A person never forgets the landscape of their childhood'. 
She's one of the few people able to look beyond the lines on my face to see the twenty-year-old who lives inside. 
Which fairy-tale princess ever chose her maid over her prince? 
How bright such memories seem when the life they catalogue is threatened! Afterwards, 
A figment who'd slipped through the cracks of history and been forgotten. 
I understood somehow that certain images, certain sounds, could not be shared and could not be lost. 
They were young; time hadn't yet rubbed at them, polishing their differences and sharpening their opinions ... 
Creatures that grow up in the wilderness turn out wild. 
It was safe to say that neither had ever known the other sort of love, the sort with fireworks and racing hearts and physical desires. 
I'm just titivating our dinner. 
Always remember, with a strong enough will, even the weak can wield great power. 
Lack of potatoes left a person's stomach growling, but absence of beauty hardened the soul. 
But it is human, is it not, to long for that from which we are barred? 
There was a pessimism in his soul, a darkness in his outlook, that always left her somehow more aware of hard edges than she had been before. 
It was not the first time I had been reminded of what happened at Riverton, to Robbie and the Hartford sisters. Once 