Quotes from Susan Meissner

Something in the way he said this filled me with warmth and instant joy. It was as though I had been sipping hot cocoa and the liquid was sliding down my throat and into my tummy on the coldest winter day. The feeling was lovely and exhilarating, even though it was surely ninety degrees in the park.

The key is to never let someone else tell you what to think.

I'd been too afraid my tears would christen it with my sorrows. I wanted nothing about the fire to exist in my

But with Mama and Uncle Fred and Charlie, the world doesn't stop. It just keeps spinning, with all its troubles, yanking us into its wild revolutions. There is no stepping into mourning, all secluded with nothing but much-warranted sorrow for company. Instead it's as if the train we're all on switched tracks at full speed and now we are racing forward in a completely new direction with no time to think about the destination we'd been headed toward before and now will never see.

her it is complicated fighting for freedom and justice, but necessary if they were to hold on to what made them human and not beasts.

And I wonder, not for the first time, if the right thing to do is always the best thing.

sublimely human, isn't it? Not unsullied genetic

This flu is like a black shroud that has been flung across everything that breathes under the canopy of heaven, and if you could stand back far enough, you wouldn't see all the people it touches, only the immense length and breadth of its expanse.

We are both of us torn by the weight of knowing all these people cannot possibly be witches. If we speak in their defense, we become accused. If we say nothing, we condemn them falsely with our silence. What would God have us do?

when God gave the world the Renaissance artists, He gave us artistic genius the likes of which have not been seen since. Renaissance is a French word with a lovely meaning. It means to be reborn. It is a word with hope infused in every letter. It assures us that what has fallen into pieces can be made whole, what has sagged into ugliness can be made beautiful again, what has died can have life breathed into it once more.

The primroses always come back. Even after a hard winter, they find a way to survive. They come back every spring.

Don't talk to me about fate, I wanted to say to Dora. Fate is just another word for saying we're all powerless. Me. Mama. Papa. Maggie. All of us. 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.

floating away from me like a cloud on the wind.

It wants to send us end over end so that what was up will be down.

I had no idea the gap between earth and heaven is narrow, no wider than a jump over a brook. I'd always thought heaven was so far from the living, no one could measure its distance from earth. Even the wisest person ever born couldn't look up at the night sky through the most powerful telescope and catch a glimpse of heaven, it was that far off.

children, as they grow, learn about the world and their place in it by testing what they know and experimenting with what they don't.

There is only the stunningly fragile human body, a holy creation capable of loving with such astonishing strength but which is weak to the curses of a fallen world. We are like butterflies, delicate and wonderful, here on earth for only a brilliant moment and then away we fly. Death is appointed to merely close the door to our suffering and open wide the gate to Paradise.

Heaven is just on the other side of waking . . . I can feel the canopy lifting, and I am not afraid . . . Look! Can you see it? It's so beautiful! Look! So beautiful!

Despair is love's fiercest enemy.

It's as if there's a bridge they need to cross. And it's like crossing over the ocean, Brette.

Ralph Waldo Emerson that "Life is a journey, not a destination.

Henrietta might have said.

I wanted to be wanted. And for the past dozen years I've known firsthand what it's like to be sought after. It's funny how when you get what you've always longed for, sometimes the reason you wanted it no longer exists.

We're going to be okay. Lainey isn't the glue that keeps us together. We are. We're the glue. Okay?