Quotes from T. Greenwood

We pretended she'd only gotten lost in the colors of fall. Piper

the secret to happiness is counting your blessings while others are adding up their troubles.

I'm a half-empty kind of girl.

How sad was it that grief had a shelf life, he thought. It's only fresh and raw for so long before it begins to spoil. And soon enough, it would be replaced by a newer, brighter heartache - the old one discarded and eventually forgotten.

And everything with you is always so, I don't know, fucking heavy.

The Chinese philosopher Mencius believed that man is innately good. He argued that anyone who saw a child falling into a well would immediately feel shock and alarm, and that this impulse, this universal capacity for commiseration, was proof positive that man is inherently good.

Sometimes I felt like the mundane details of our lives were the only things tethering me to the world. I could hold onto them - distractions necessitating action. They gave me a sense of purpose. If not for the leaky faucet, the sandwiches, the bills, I might not know what to do with my hands.

Sometimes things need to get broken

My mother, stuck in Two Rivers with a head full of unfulfilled dreams, escaped every chance she got via the Two Rivers Free Library - her library card both a passport and necessary currency for her travels.

We lived among people whose poverty could be seen in the length of their faces, in their tired speech and in the heaviness of their eyes.

I thought about things stolen from me. I thought about the thieves I had known.

Don't you hate waking up after the day's already started?" Jake usually asks, like it's a race. As though by the time I roll out of bed I'm already lagging behind everyone else, as if I'll never be able to catch my stride.

It didn't matter where they went, the stars followed. A map of the universe spread out before them.

Memory is the same as water. It is a still lake bathed in moonlight, a vast ocean, a violent river ready to carry you away. It can calm you or it can harm you; it is both more powerful and weaker than you'd think. It is a paradox.

It is too easy lately to drink too much. To love the warm way it numbs. And I feel Jake watching me; he's counting my drinks too.

And I think about how I used to be the one who fixed things. How I used to be the strong one. When did this happen to me? What have I become? Effie

I feel my skin growing warm. But it isn't the fact that Gussy told Effie about Eva, about everything that happened, but rather that someone would see beauty in the story. The idea that someone could hear about what happened all those years ago and not be disgusted, horrified, by all the tragedies that followed, that someone could find a sliver of the goodness, the beauty, I cling to is almost more than I can handle.

People say we are defined by the choices that we make;

When you have suffered betrayal by the universe, a betrayal by a man is not only unsurprising but expected.

And just like that, it's over

Longing that is deeper than want. It's not as simple as desire. It's more like missing something you've never had.

A body forgets, but the heart remembers.

Da Vinci said, "A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light." And so, perhaps, if this day were a painting, I would begin with black. Mermaid Tears By the time Avery woke up, I was sick of painting.

she was swept up in the cheery and excited swell of these girls, which carried her down North 7th Street toward Federal. They were like bees, she thought, buzzing and fairly harmless alone, but thrumming and dangerous as a group. She was caught up in the magic of this swarm as they made their way to the Woolworth's.