Quotes from Joy Jordan-Lake

A life worth living is one of compassion. And a life of compassion will include many tears.

You've had a tough crack at life, I'll give you that. But you don't got to let the bad thrown at you become the ugly you think you got to be.

You make sure you do something good with your life, you hear? Something that puts more beauty and more kindness into the world. And be a person of courage, my Kate. With a tender heart but a lot tougher hide.

It's part of the role mountains play in our lives. To make us feel small. Humbled.

Now all white Southern women keep as a weapon against uncouth world a certain smile that can be whipped out of storage and tacked up, in an instant, covering over a multitude of too-candid moments. My mother's face, whose upturned mouth never moved, registered confusion, then fear-then landed where I expected that steely doggedly cheerful resolve of a smile.

A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives." —Jackie Robinson

But Kerry allowed her first thought, bitter as ginger root, to go where most first thoughts should go: unsaid. Skimmed off to leave something kinder beneath.

Some days, and this was one, she felt as if bitterness were turning her insides to something like pine knots and sparks, just seconds away from exploding.

Here were the pained and hopeful voices of people who knew despair was life and life was despair—and grace was there for the taking.

Speak less than thou knowest.

Bunch a buildings that outgrowed the sky.

There's a beauty, and there's a strength, you know, that grows only in a long walk together in the same direction.

Whereas books, once read, become fully a part of us.

Funny how much I've read about this place for months—pages and pages of history. And no idea how little I knew until I came for myself.

Maybe, she thought, grown-up life was not so much finding your perfect place in the world, but aching for all the faraway places and people you loved—and learning to look at right where you are now, as Rema would say, through a long eyepiece of grateful.

The twins didn't need to be infected with her resentment. Because resentment, she knew, once under the skin, festers. And spreads.

Britches," John Cabot murmured. To Vanderbilt, he said in a low voice, "It's fascinating—the connections of their speech with Elizabethan England, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as Africa, significantly. Their speech, the construction of their homes, their methods of farming, their musical instruments, all of it hardly evolved from earlier eras across oceans. Like a time capsule here in the hollows of the Blue Ridge.

Sometimes I do slip and say what I mean, instead of what ought to be said.

But Rose lifted her champagne flute in a toast. "It is precisely our unfortunate characteristics that make any of us interesting—wouldn't you say, ladies? Those of us, I might add, who are interesting." Maneuvering Kate away from the gaggle, Rose led her through the gardens and down to the river.

I think I upset your father

Only for some of us, maybe forgiveness is more a journey than a moment in time. Me, I won't be getting there fast.

up of feeling as the next man, including a brute of

Stubbornness is one of my few virtues.

From the narrow two-story shop, smoke curled out a crooked brick chimney, its mortar mostly crumbled away—as if it had stood leaning forward to watch the invasions and victory marches and funeral processions of two, maybe three hundred years.