Quotes from Susan Meissner

another ever after, linked together at the core of who they are because it was together that they escaped a terrible fate.

would change nothing if I were to live my life again. The person who completes your life is not so much the person who shares all the years of your existence, but rather the person who made your life worth living, no matter how long or short a time you were given to spend with them.

My weaker sex is still believed by most to be highly susceptible to fits and hysteria. I, being a woman, had better odds of becoming a future mental patient than of becoming a psychiatrist.

incredulous. I decide in that moment to tell her the barest minimum.

This is what makes us sublimely human, isn't it? Not unsullied genetic perfection, but when we stubbornly love and honor one another. Just the way we are.

I had discovered early at Ellis that a hospital nurse performs the same tasks day after day after day, and that an odd solace can be found in the monotony of those duties. Were it not for the steady thrum of the routine, the spectacle of unending human suffering would be a hospital nurse's undoing.

It's what I lost. I could see him turning the sentence around in his head. Examining it as he would a wound or an illness. And I saw in his eyes the moment he realized that fixers like him and me can easily mend broken things. But we can't easily find lost things. Finding something you lost takes a different kind of skill.

People will always distrust what they don't understand.

Everyone is calling it the Spanish flu, even though it didn't originate in Spain. No one is sure where it came from. Spain has been the first to speak openly about it in its newspapers.

I had what my own life hadn't given me.

If I am going to love people completely and at the heart of who they are, I am going to need to trust that God will watch over them in the way he sees as best.

war has a way of absolving us of the mistakes we make while in its dreadful shadow, but it keeps this absolution a secret.

what we will hate. We decide what we will do with the love and hate. Every day we decide. It was this that revealed who we were, not the color of our flesh or the shape of our eyes or the language we spoke.

Fear does not start to fade until you take the step that you think you can't.

it was a person's choices that defined his or her identity and not the other way around.

wishing I could go back in time and

Nice* was a word that I'd not been able to say in such a long time, and it encompassed so much in that moment. It truly did. *Nice* is a throwaway word until it's not.

You're very lucky Clara", they said. I didn't feel lucky. When I was little, luck was finding something you thought was lost for good, or winning a porcelain doll at the county fair, or getting a new hat, or having every dance filled on your dance card. Good luck made you feel kissed by heaven and smiled upon by the fates. Good luck made you feel giddy and invincible. Good luck didn't leave you desperately needing a place that was forever in-between yesterday and tomorrow.

there are no secrets to a charmed life. There is just the simple truth that you must forgive yourself for only being able to

Home isn't a place where everything stays the same; it's a place where you are safe and loved despite nothing staying the same.

Maybe being brave is different from being unafraid. If you're not afraid, what is there to be brave about?

Hurried people miss many things. They see only what is right on top. . .

I *was* happy, and the war, which had been so adept at stealing everything I loved, could not steal this, because happiness is not something that can be taken from you. You can lose it, but no one can take it from you. Not even the thief that is war.

These things keep me close to Mama, close even to that part of her I hadn't yet come to fully know because I was too young and we simply ran out of time.