Quotes from T. Greenwood

But Ruby understands now, this inclination. This desire to slip away. To seclude herself. She understands how it feels to be an island, separate from everyone else, surrounded by nothing but water. Even when she is with people (at school, at Izzy's house, at the pool), she is aware of how alone she is. Nobody can reach her, not really. She and her mother are more similar than different, but she doesn't know how to tell her mom this. What words might explain she understands.

My mother taught me how to find grace in wreckage. She taught me not how to reassemble, but how to rearrange. The stained-glass pictures she made were certain evidence that things can be broken and put back together, and that the mended thing will be more beautiful than the original.

By nature, looking is a disruptive task.

That's the way with sentimental things: it's the memory the junk conjures that's valuable, not the junk itself.

How do you not believe in fate? How do you ever think that you are the one in control? How could she have been so foolish as to think that she had any authority over her future? How could she have been so brazen as to think that this had anything at all to do with her?

Because the world sometimes conspires against us even as we embrace it. And sometimes the world embraces us, even as we forsake it. Maybe this is God, she thinks. This quiet, easy truth. And religion, the acceptance of it.

And, she thinks, as she looks around this sun-filled room, colored leaves pressing against the window like bits of colored glass inside a kaleidoscope, that maybe finding home is as simple, and as difficult, as finding hope.

Recollection of fear can be stronger than the original fear itself. Similarly, bliss is sometimes more vivid when recollected. How else do you explain longing? Longing for what has already passed. That's the real pain.

There is no day or night in a hospital, there is only now.

Her whole life, Crystal's mother had given her nothing but ultimatums. Conditional love. Love with strings.

the inevitable and irrevocable consequences of their quiet cruelty. They were just kids, just girls then. They didn't understand that a single act of careless unkindness would have repercussions long after

This is what I know: memory is the same as water. It permeates and saturates. Quenches and satiates. It can hold you up or pull you under; render you weightless or drown you. It is tangible, but elusive.

She hears a zipper, and when she closes her eyes, she can almost see Ruby's hand reaching into her backpack, finding whatever book she is reading. She wonders what world she will slip into tonight and knows this ability is something she has given her: a genetic inheritance like her dark hair and Robert's green eyes. Because the only time Sylvie leaves the house anymore is through the paper portals of her novels.

this world you live in...might feel unkind, but the world is bigger than this. It won't be like this forever. If you can just survive this, someday I promise you will be appreciated. And happy. And loved.

She wanted to say something that would let him know how much he'd hurt her. Something that would hurt him. But words failed her. They tangled together like knotted shoestrings in her mind, so she said nothing.

you can't be ruined by things that others do to you but only by what you do to others.

Her grandmother's pistol passed down, like a recipe for strudel.

He wreaked havoc, but his path of destruction was invisible. The girls and I were the casualties of an amnesiac.

But there's no pause in real life. There's also no rewind. And there's definitely no delete. There's just now running on and on, and you can't ever stop it, no matter what you do.

The people you trust the most are sometimes the ones who betray you the worst. And the people you love more than anything are the ones who will break your heart.