Quotes from Sibella Giorello

And then, just as quickly, the clouds returned, leaving us to walk by faith, not by sight.

On the East Coast, sunrise will steal the breath right out of your body.

In mourning, I realized the most painful place on earth was sometimes the church you attended with the person you loved, the person now gone.

And broken things can be fixed.

I felt a surge of love for my aunt. We disagreed about so many things, yet here was family: the people who kept dancing with you, even after the music stopped.

As-is. Every woman needs a man who loves her as-is. He doesn't want to change anything about her." She sighed. "Oh, no greater safety in this world than that kind of love. And then life turns into the most grand and wonderful adventure.

unknowns—all the things that transcended understanding, the miracles that pervaded individual lives and stretched back to a majesty spoken into existence, to a sacrifice that continued to resonate within our souls thousands of years later. A sacrifice based on adoption: he chose us, he loved us, then he died for the worst within us.

We disagreed about so many things, yet here was family: the people who kept dancing with you, even after the music stopped.

Dead bodies, I told myself, were nothing more than broken shells on a beach. It was just that in the morgue, that beach so often looked like a bad stretch of the Jersey shore.

We fought an enemy, invisible yet definite, who diligently worked to block us from our intended purpose, keeping us from the one thing that brought joy, that connected us to each other and to our Creator

all the while one simple supernatural prescription waited: "Come to me.

If I thought it felt good to come home to the place I loved and find that it waited for me, it was nothing compared to the feeling of returning to a God who loved me and who waited for me. That was home, true home.

The kind of laughter, that sudden joy that strikes hidden fault lines and cracks them wide open.

A horizontal band of amber sunlight smoldered beneath banks of gunmetal clouds, like lamplight leaking from beneath a closed door.

I could see the solace she discovered. Here she could sing and dance and shout for glory among people who didn't care which pew she sat in, whose people she belonged to, and whether she was baking a roast for the church homecoming. They were people who yearned for one thing, and one thing only: a pure relationship with that part of the Trinity so often neglected in organized worship. The Holy Spirit. Slouching

Her drawing conveyed a forlorn and haunting suspense, as if asking the viewer to wonder whether these creatures would still be alive when the tide came back.

Three hundred years later, the van came to a stop.

She wore amethyst-purple woolen slacks paired with a bright yellow leather jacket, like a human being hoping to become an iris.

tall evergreens whose long and lush boughs were coated with mineral dust, like elegant ladies wearing too much face powder.

dripping with rain, the umbrellas looked like crumpled bouquets cast aside by sobbing brides.

No, I'm saying those Yankees are messing things up again. No respectable Southern woman would ever say a girl was Rosewell's 'power mower.' For heaven's sake. That's ridiculous. But those Yankees have tin ears. On language alone we should have won the war." She looked at us. "The woman called that floozy his paramour. But some Yankee messed it up. Paramour. Power mower. You hear the difference?" Wally glanced at me. She was