Quotes from Kristin Harmel

so that he could hear the things she wasn't saying and understand that she was with him.

And though grief weighed her down—she couldn't take a step without seeing Sister Maria Andrzeja's empty eyes—she also felt lighter, untethered at last from a past that had always been an invisible weight. She was not Jerusza's—she never had been, and she knew that now. But neither was she her German father's. She belonged only to herself, a dove of the dark forest, the forest that called to her now.

Home is not a place, but the people you choose to love.

My mistake wasn't in letting the marriage end; it was in fooling myself into believing that marrying him was a good idea in the first place.

May I say something, too?" She hesitated, fighting the urge to look away from him. "I don't know much about these things. But I think that broken hearts heal. I think that perhaps the only way through that kind of pain is to move forward. I think that losing people you love changes you forever, but I think that God finds a way to let the light in.

But God believes in you, my dear," Sister Maria Andrzeja replied immediately. She looked up and held Yona's gaze. "And that makes us all the same, all over the world.

Maybe the lie wasn't as wrong if it wasn't uttered aloud.

it's terrible to see her slipping away. It's like standing on the deck of a boat, watching the waves suck someone under, and knowing that there's no life preserver to throw in.

I smile tightly at him. I'm allowed to feel annoyed with my daughter, but he's not. "She's just going through a hard time," I say.

The word choice was strange, but I nodded, because she was right. It was inconvenient to love someone who would never love you the same way, because it held you back in life. It tied you to something you could never have.

Because they are ignorant. And cruelty is the weapon of the ignorant." "But what if I don't want to be Jewish?

Hope, you were born to do this," he says with his mouth full, and although I know it's a compliment, the words hit me hard, because I never intended to do this at all. It wasn't the life I wanted for myself, and Matt knows it. But my grandmother got sick, my mother died, and I no longer had a choice.

It is the feeling. You have to feel the things you paint in your soul, or they won't come through to your paintbrush.

Because, my dear, it is good to remember that you do not always have to see something to know that it is there.

But I think you stand to lose far more when your heart is closed," Chaim said. "That is no life.

can't always change other people's minds. But you can change whether or not you listen to them, can't you?

Remember: the planes cost a bloody fortune. You, on the other hand, are easily replaceable. Act accordingly

The truth is, since the day I met her, it's all been for her. My whole life. My whole existence. I don't know how I'll say good-bye.

Let them believe that the fairy tales were the fiction, and that everything else was real.

I never understood the war between our religions, or the war with Christianity. If there is one thing I learned from the time young Rose spent with us, it is that we are all speaking to the same God. It is not religion that divides man. It is good and evil here on earth that divides us.

Life doesn't work out the way we plan, but maybe it works out the way it's supposed to after all.