Quotes from Susan Meissner

I find her often at the peach tree, looking up at its branches and listening to the rustle of its leaves.

When darkness falls completely and Martin is still not home, I light the stove and place pork cutlets that I rubbed with butter and dried sage into a roasting pan alongside potatoes and carrots so that supper will be ready when he finally returns.

hope you have the courage and wisdom to make different choices.

You don't have to say everything you're thinking, Elise," he said.

Maybe this is what losing a child does to you. It peels off the top layer of who you are, like a snake shedding its skin, and underneath is new skin, and because it's new, it's not the same.

thoughts are not things you can give or not give. Thoughts are thrust upon you. You can only hope that thoughts that you don't want will tire of you at some point and flutter away

Everything beautiful has a story it

An amaryllis is always waiting to delight and surprise you, even when your world seems cold and dark.

I had been told something like that before. That the past is nothing you can make friends or enemies of. It just is what it is. Or was. It is this day you are living right now, this very day, that is yours to make of it what you will. So make it beautiful, if you can.

memories have no power but what I allow them.

Only one way out now. I love you, Taryn. I'm coming.

she is in the company of women who have given what help they could.

He was worried I might one day naively mix laundry bleach with ammonia and he wanted to make sure I understood some things cannot be stirred together into the same pot because they will react in ways that can hurt someone. It is that way with fear and ignorance, I think.

guess our eyes don't change much from when we were young. Perhaps it's just how we see things that changes.

And just as it is the nature of men and women to build, it is also in our nature to begin again after disaster. This I know, too.

Wars begin and wars end. There will be peace again. We only need to hold on to who we are, deep within, so that we'll recognize ourselves on the other side when it's over.

You cannot undo the past but wishing it undone.

Sometimes it's not about right and wrong but now and later. Right now, we are having to put up with a difficult situation that we don't deserve, and it's not right. But later, when the war is over, we'll remember that we didn't let it break us. . . .

That makes it survival. That is what you do in war. You find a way to survive.

The gaping unknown

This ghost was the ship.

We shouldn't think for a moment that just because their lives are short they shouldn't be here.

killing disabled people in the name of mercy.

Love something long enough and true enough and fate will tear it right out of your hands if it chooses, and there's nothing you can do about it.