Quotes from Luanne Rice

Just like the splashing waves, the whispering sand, the crying gulls. Everything in nature meant something, alive with private poetry for any person willing to listen.

was sleeping, but my heart kept vigil.

forks in the road. Going left, and only later realizing that if you'd gone right everything in your life would have been different. Split-second decisions—or ones you had the chance to consider for years. The choice of who to love, what to do, whether to stay together…

You can have everything in the world, and have nothing. Or you can have little and have it all.

Falling in love," his father had said. "It's like taking a horse over a brush fence—you get air, rise up, take the jump. And you might land okay, or you might go flying. You want to make sure you're on solid ground. That's what loving someone is like: you land safely. You have ground under your feet.

a man I loved and cared about but wasn't in love with.

and that laugh was my signal that it was all about to change.

In all these years, how often had she wished she could call Rumer? With the happy news that followed good notices, the time she had worried about a mammogram, all the little things Michael had said and done.

gone out somewhere—had he

knew I had a choice—I could fight him on his statement, stand up for myself and say it was hard to be understanding of someone who flew off the handle so easily.

You can't change the way he feels," the doctor said. "But you can change the way you react to what he says and does. You have power over that, Madeleine. His emotions don't have to dictate your responses.

Jane put her hand on the calendar, as if she could take those days right in through her skin, her pores, into her blood and bones, hold them forever. But time didn't work that way. Time was all about the present. It was where you were and what you were doing, in any given moment, that gave life its meaning.

You know what's the worst thing about parents dying?" Harrison said. "It's all the questions you'll never get to ask them. Little things you thought you'd have forever to find out.

complicated women— fearful at heart but evil in deed.

Nothing is solid; nothing is black and white. Love is fluid, and so is peace, without shape or edges, fresh water flowing from the river's mouth into the sea.

Girls without mothers either tried too hard or not hard enough; as they got older, they sometimes wore extra makeup, as if it could mask the fact they didn't know what to do, how to act.

Kate's love helps me forgive myself for my own death. The choices I made, the people I hurt. But now I know—the best of us waste our time repenting, forgiving everyone but ourselves. And the worst don't even realize there is anything to forgive. Hungry ghosts wander the earth, trapped in the bardo, seeking redemption that had been there all along.

they hide their secrets. Like all great stories, Last Day is a compulsive, twisting mystery dwelling inside a searing portrait of what drives us, as riveting as it is human and true." —Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author of The Stranger

EVERYONE THOUGHT QUINN was watching Meet the Press with Grandma, even Grandma. Lying on the sofa, covered with an afghan, Quinn had simply rolled off and stuffed pillows under the covers while Grandma stared at the screen. Then she had sidled upstairs, out her bedroom window, and down the oak tree growing right by the house.

When I get to heaven and it's full of angels, I won't meet anyone better than you.

The artist used houses and barns and land along the Connecticut River as his subjects." Just as Ben Morrison had used the island and the brook. "Did Nason know your grandmother?" "Yes. She said he was the most poetic artist in America. She meant it literally. Some of his prints illustrated books

Growing up, there had always been candles burning, not for the light they gave, but for remembrance. Her grandmother used to say the flame honored a person's spirit, reminded the living that the dead were never really gone.

But her life on this earth had taught her this: that love, in the end, was all that mattered. Friends, families, suitors, husbands: Goodness abounded in all of them.

Someday's better. It's always in the future, and it's always possible.