Quotes from Emily Franklin

You did respond—your response was the worst kind—you did nothing.

That's what the best par of life is, those days or minutes you can't ever frame or paint beforehand

it's funny how you can't exactly pick your crush. well, you can, but once it get hold of you, it's hard to shake off.

it occured to her that kissing and being kissed were two different things. and being kissed by someone you've really wanted to is something else again.

maybe one of the reasons i don't express myself as well as i want to is because inside, shoved way down into an unseen pit, i'm not sure of what i want.

or maybe love is summed up in moments - that day in the park, the time you had chinese food by candlelight, when the boy you liked left a message, finally, on your machine. maybe the telling of those moments is even better than the moments themselves.

jenna had felt sexy-funny, like lucille ball with flour streaks on her face, a crumb-covered apron that didn't exactly flatter her, and yet nick had kissed her like a prom king falling for the reinvented girl in a movie.

There are umbrellas for rain. Parkas for blizzards. Storm cellars for tornadoes. But there's no protection for this.

she thinks about lying in here with alex, of the tangle of arms and rope, or lips.

i mean, heather said, our bodies are just these things that we float around in. it's not like they belong to anyone

It is still possible, after all, to forge a covenant that binds us not to God in obedience but to one another in mercy. We need only choose, this year, to keep the flame lit...

That's what being Jewish is: summoning the means to question who you are and how you have behaved. Have you remained alight in the darkness of cruel wishes,..? Have you forgiven? Have you lived up to the standards of your one and only heart?

lucy went along with her mother because ginny wanted her to, because lucy felt it was what girls did with their mothers - watch in silence as, under the cones of dryers, mothers fell out of listening range and into the distance.

she thought about being held to the woman's chest, and lying there hair-smoothed and quiet until she felt she'd found home.

jenna preferred to think of alice that way - like an art project, colors swirling inside her, rather than of how sick she was.

at keltner's deli, everything was somehow neutralized. they were girls. they were girls with odd names who smoked after school together and maybe sometimes alone.

he can see alice in wet leaves, first as kids, when they'd jump in them, then as teenagers, when she would lie on the cold ground and he'd cover her with red, orange, and yellow fallen leaves and he would wait for her, wait for her with his heart racing, hoping he hadn't covered her up so much she couldn't jump up, bringing them both to action.

she uncurls danny's small fists and clasps his hand to hers and notices the way even in his sleep his fingers seem to know their way around hers; their hands together form their own organ, or an x, like on a map that insists you are here.

The task of any good cook, of any parent, is to be present- in the kitchen and out. To taste all the items, absorb each child's day, all those moments, and form them into the day's meals.

I live on the very edge of my charm.

Perhaps this was the point of travel, keeping bits of daily life to ground us while feeling also altogether stretched at the wideness of the world.

travel cracks open the globe, shows us people and forests we would never otherwise experience, but ultimately it must also hold a mirror.

Don't spoil a good story by telling the truth.

Just when you think you have summed everything up, painted it clearly and given meaning to what was once just a pool of colored paint, another canvas crops up blank and ready to be filled.