Quotes from Christina Baker Kline

What she wants most—what she truly yearns for—is what any of us want: to be seen. And look. She is.

Know what a symbol is?...Shit that stands for shit.

Vivian has come back to the idea that the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn a corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles.

And if I'm honest, there's something else. Gertrude has become a stand-in for anyone who ever pitied me, didn't try to understand me, abandoned me. She gives my bitterness a place to dwell.

Moral allegories about people determined to root out wickedness in others while denying it in themselves." "Actually,

I wonder what those stars are meant to represent. They must be proof that you are especially worthy, that you shine a little brighter than everyone else. But if you wake with the blessed in heaven, isn't that enough? Haven't you achieved the most you could've hoped for? The

It's brave to resist the pull of the familiar. To be selfish about your own needs. I wrestle with that every day.

How strange, I think—that I am in a place my parents have never been and will never see. How strange that I am here and they are gone.

ORPHAN TRAIN is a specifically American story of mobility and rootlessness, highlighting a little-known but historically significant moment in our country's past. Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains transported more than two hundred thousand orphaned, abandoned, and homeless children—many

She offers me a bull's-eye sweet, which she's stashed in her apron pocket with a half-dozen half-smoked Afton butts—a mix of flavors I'll never forget. On the front of the yellow cigarette box is a poem by Robert Burns that Gram likes to sing to an old Irish tune: Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes. Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise.

Every person you've ever cared about, and every place you've ever loved, is one of these shells. You're the thread that ties them together," she'd said, touching Mathinna's cheek. "You carry the people and places you cherish with you.

Nos aferramos el uno al otro como supervivientes de un naufragio, asombrados de que ninguno de los dos se haya ahogado.

it?" "Friday, April fourth, ma'am." She coughs. Then she doubles over and coughs

I am the only one of my siblings with red hair. When I asked my da where I got it, he joked that there must've been rust in the pipes. His own hair was dark—"cured," he said, through years of toil—but when he was young it was more like auburn. Nothing like yours, he said. Your hair is as vivid as a Kinvara sunset, autumn leaves, the Koi goldfish in the window of that hotel in Galway. Mr. Grote doesn't

Siento que toda mi vida ha sido un azar. Momentos fortuitos de pérdida y conexión. En cambio, esta es la primera vez que siento que es el destino.

Thinking about all of this, I feel a sudden rush of anticipation, an abstract yearning. Unfamiliar as it is, I do remember it. I experienced this feeling as a little girl the night before Christmas, and later when I was applying to college, and even later when I moved to New York. It's a longing for things to come, possibilities unfolding before me, the charged expectation of change.

The things that matter stay with you, seep into your skin

Regret?" Vivian raises her shoulders in a shrug. "I'm not sure what good it is to regret.

The reading part of her feels private, between her and the characters in a book.

I am halfway between two worlds, the known and the unknown. I feel as transparent as the wind, as if my spirit is hovering in the sky, waiting to land. I am driving toward a future I can't see, leaving behind a past that already feels distant. Nothing is clear - and yet the trees are sharp against the sky; I can see the hard outlines of everything.

Molly learned long ago that a lot of the heartbreak and betrayal that other people fear their entire lives, she has already faced. Father dead. Mother off the deep end. Shuttled around and rejected time and time again. And still she breathes and sleeps and grows taller. She wakes up every morning and puts on clothes. So when she says it's okay, what she means is that she knows she can survive just about anything. And

servants, men in top hats and morning coats, shop girls in

When Vivian describes how it felt to be at the mercy of strangers, Molly nods. She knows full well what it's like to tamp down your natural inclinations, to force a smile when you feel numb.

Molly learned long ago that a lot of the heartbreak and betrayal that other people fear their entire lives, she has already faced...So when she says it's okay, what she means is that she knows she can survive just about anything.