Quotes from Christina Baker Kline

neighborhood, the place I left each

that 90 percent of them had died by 1620, almost entirely a result of contact with settlers, who brought foreign diseases and

This is our privy. Don't ever let Mrs. Byrne catch you using the one in the house." She pronounces catch "kitch.

Sometimes these spirits have been more real to me than people, more real than God. They fill silence with their weight, dense and warm, like bread dough rising under cloth.

She didn't know that Indian women had more power and authority than white women, a fact detailed in captivity stories.

She feels like a circus clown who wakes up one morning and no longer wants to glue on the red rubber nose.

Aprendí hace mucho que la pérdida no solo es probable, sino inevitable.

And though they were called savages, even a prominent English general, Philip Sheridan, had to admit, "We took away their country and their means of support. It was for this and against this that they made war. Could anyone expect less?

Feeling around in the bag, he said, "Aw, shit. I meant to get you a chain to clip these on." He patted her knee. "Don't worry about it. That'll be part two." Two weeks later, coming home late one night, he lost control of his car, and that was that. Within six months, Molly was living somewhere else. It would be years until she bought herself that chain.

In Mr. Reed's classroom there's a photo of Molly Molasses taken near the end of her life. In it she sits ramrod straight, wearing a beaded, peaked headdress and two large silver brooches around her neck. Her face is dark and wrinkled and her expression is fierce. Sitting in the empty classroom after school one day, Molly stares at that face for a long time, looking for answers to questions she doesn't know how to ask.

the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments.

When I was seventeen I went to college to escape my father's impotent rage and my mother's infinite capacity for forgiveness.

The smallest things get to her. It's as if she assumes everything will go right, and when it doesn't -- which, of course, is pretty often -- she is surprised and affronted.

I look up into the starless sky. My heart pounds. This silent badlands scares me more than nighttime in the city, with its noise and light.

Pushing the hair back from my face and tracing the line of my jaw with his finger, he says, "With you I'd be happy anywhere.

story. (And anyway, Lori doesn't ask "why" questions. She's only

I puzzle over the onionskin, trying to spill my heart onto the page. But I can only come up with the same words, in the same order, and hope the depth of feeling beneath them gives them weight and substance. I love you. I miss you.

I don't think I've missed much." "Wireless Internet, digital photographs, smartphones, Facebook, YouTube . . ." Molly taps the fingers of one hand. "The entire world has changed in the past decade." "Not my world." "But you're missing out on so much." Vivian laughs. "I hardly think FaceTube—whatever that is—would improve my quality of life.

that there were over thirty thousand Wabanakis living on the East Coast in 1600 and that 90 percent of them had died by 1620, almost entirely a result of contact with settlers, who brought foreign diseases and alcohol, drained resources, and fought with the tribes for control of the land.

The ghosts whispered to me, telling me to go on.

I did not love him the way I loved Dutchy: beyond reason. Maybe you only get one of those in a lifetime.

Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley. Our teacher made us memorize the words to "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and alone in the kitchen now I close my eyes and whisper Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time . . . but that's all I can remember.

I try to think the simpler thing; it's easier that way. But then life complicates it, two minds living and thinking in the same small space. You think you've placed a thought or a memory so you can live with it, and then that other mind comes crowding in and knocks it down.

Maybe it doesn't matter how much gets done. Maybe the value is in the process—in touching each item, in naming and identifying, in acknowledging the significance of a cardigan, a pair of children's boots.