Quotes from Christina Baker Kline

This girl may never go anywhere. She should at least know that adventure is in her bones." When

She says she can't believe she raised a child who traveled all over the world but has been content ever since to let the world come to her.

The next morning Sadie helps me into her cream-colored Packard sedan

He squints at me. "Except for the red hair and freckles, you look okay. You'll be fine and dandy sitting at the table with a napkin on your lap.

When I think about what would make me happy, I am struck by how basic my desires are. I want to feel that I'm progressing through life; I want a meaningful relationship and an engaging career. I want to live in a place that feels like home. What I want is what everyone wants - so ordinary as to be cliched. Why is that so hard to find?

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.

Fairy tales end happily ever after because children crave certainly and resolution; they need to know how things turn out. But if my experiences in the past three months have shown me anything, it's that I am comfortable living with more questions than answers. My own story will always be a work in progress.

The older I get, the more I believe that the greatest kindness

I've come to think that's what heaven is—a place in the memory of others where our best selves live on. Maybe

No substitute for the living, perhaps, but I wasn't given a choice. I could take solace in their presence or I could fall down in a heap, lamenting what I'd lost. The ghosts whispered to me, telling me to go on.

We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope . . . For this light momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison . . .

What's the best thing that happened to you in the past ten years?" I ask. "Seeing you again." Smiling, I push back against his chest. "Besides that." "Meeting you the first time.

Before we leave the gravesite, Mary sings Mother's favorite gospel hymn ... Mary's lovely voice rises and lingers in the air, and by the end of the song most of us are crying. I am too, though I still don't know what those stars are meant to represent. My mistake, I suppose, is in thinking they should mean something.

Angel's trumpet. Beautiful, in'it? Eating these flowers makes your troubles go away. Problem is, too much will kill ye." She laughed. "It got its name because it's the last thing you'll see before ascending into heaven.

notice." The false cheer in her voice is evidence of how

Molly is suddenly struck by the fact that Vivian wrote these words on this sheet of paper more than eighty years ago. Upright and do right make all right.

The most important qualities a human can possess are an iron will and a persevering spirit,

I like to be busy," she says. "And useful. I think those are pretty basic human desires—don't you?

I'm one of few children on the train who can read. Mam taught me all my letters years ago, in Ireland, then taught me how to spell. When we got to New York, she'd make me read to her, anything with words on it—crates and bottles I found in the street.

Because we're older. And this is where we belong." "No it isn't. It is just where we ended up.

wage an ongoing war with the elements...we have to push back against the unruly outdoors to keep chaos at bay.

Who are you, Christina Olson? he asked me once. Nobody had ever asked me that. I had to think about it for a while.

I sit on a rock, watching her. She seems better, I think. But now and then I see her staring off into the distance with a blank expression on her face, and it worries me.

All at once I am so tired of this-of the constant threat of humiliation and pain, the fear of exposure, of trying to act like I'm normal when I'm not- that I burst into tears. No, I am not all right, I want to say. I am fouled, degraded, ashamed, a burden and an embarrassment.