Quotes from Christina Baker Kline

The stark gray sky and bare tree limbs feel more suited to her than the uncomplicated promise of sunny spring days.

Mamey said that in her day a woman who had not married by the age of thirty was called a thornback, named after a flat, spiny, prehistoric-looking fish.

He did get one thing right: Sometimes a sanctuary, sometimes a prison, that house on the hill has always been my home. I've spent my life yearning toward it, wanting to escape it, paralyzed by its hold on me. (There are many ways to be crippled, I've learned over the years, many forms of paralysis.) My ancestors fled to Maine from Salem, but like anyone who tries to run away from the past, they brought it with them.

Time constricts and flattens, you know. It's not evenly weighted. Certain moments linger in the mind and others disappear.

Something inexorable seeds itself in the place of your origin. You can never escape the bonds of family history, no matter how far you travel. And the skeleton of a house can carry in its bones the marrow of all that came before. Who are you, Christina Olson? he asked me once. Nobody had ever asked me that. I had to think about it for a while. If

My heart is shattered, an all that's left are jagged shards.

Wandering among the cardboard boxes, Vivian trails her fingertips across the tops of them, peering at their cryptic labels: The store, 1960–. The Nielsens. Valuables. "I suppose this is why people have children, isn't it?" she muses. "So somebody will care about the stuff they leave behind.

And eventually-though neither of us knew it yet-we'd end up here, in this place, within and without the world of the painting.

Whether your journey is long or short, He will help you as long as you place your trust in Him.

When the breakfast dishes are cleared, she starts on the large midday meal: chicken pie or pot roast or fish stew; mashed or boiled potatoes; peas or carrots, fresh or canned, depending on the season. What's left over reappears at supper, transformed into a casserole or a stew. Mother

She has learned that she can control her emotions by thinking of her chest cavity as an enormous box with a chain lock. She opens the box and stuffs in any stray unmanageable feelings, any wayward sadness or regret, and clamps it shut.

Over the years, certain stories in the history of family take hold. They're passes from generation to generation, gaining substance and meaning along the way. You have to learn to sift through them, separating fact from conjecture, the likely form the implausible. Here is what I know: Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones.

You can live for a long time inside the shell you were born in. But one day it'll become too small." "Then

I know all too well how it is when the beautiful visions you've been fed don't match up with reality.

Though she was never correctly diagnosed in her lifetime, neurologists now believe she had a syndrome called Charcot-Marie-Tooth, a hereditary disorder that damages the nerves to the arms and legs.) Christina

She stayed as quiet as she could. This, she found, was the trick: you didn't have to react to each little thing. You could just exist. Let your mind simmer over a low fire.

It's clear to me now that for twenty years I have gone through the motions of each day like a dumb animal, neither daring to hope for a different kind of life nor even knowing enough to desire one.

There are many ways to be crippled, I've learned over the years, many forms of paralysis.)

I feel myself battening down, fortressing

Mathinna remembered what her mother had said about thinking of yourself as the thread of a necklace, the people and places you treasure as the shells. Maybe Wanganip and Hazel were saying the same thing: that if you love something it stays with you, even after it's gone.

She felt her fear unspooling like a tight fist opening. It was as if she'd been standing on a precipice and suddenly tipped forward. There was no point in feeling afraid. She was already falling, falling through the air, and her future, whatever it held, was rushing up to meet her.

It's a bitter nostalgia from a moment not yet passed.

And this is where we belong." "No, it isn't. It's just where we ended up.

From the recesses of my brain a word floats up: synecdoche. A part that stands in for the whole. Christina's World.