Quotes from Jenna Blum

unbelievable

AS IF TO COMPENSATE for the punitive winter, the city explodes with flowers overnight—making it, if only for a week or two, one of the most beautiful places on earth.

but what June had been thinking of while she searched for the right pieces, tried this one here and that one there, was how it was like a marriage, the accretion of details, of small joys and sorrows and catchphrases and hurts and rituals all adding up to a bigger picture eventually, even if it was impossible to see, while doing it, how it all fit.

Nothing is ever quite right, is it, after a parent dies? No matter how well things go, something always feels slightly off . . .

when you found yourself alive at the end of it, you were no longer sure whether that was a good thing.

blessing of scars: the deeper they were, the more you couldn't feel anything in them at all.

Life is so often unfair and painful and love is hard to find and you have to take it whenever and wherever you can get it, no matter how brief it is or how it ends.

How could she tell him that we come to love those who save us?

Heimat. The word mean home in German, the place where one was born. But the term also conveys a subtler nuance, a certain tenderness. One's Heimat is not merely a matter of geography; it is where one's heart lies.

Nothing is ever quite right, is it, after a parent dies? No matter how well things go, something always feels slightly off...

We are all ashamed in one way or another. Who among us is not stained by the past?

She can never tell him what she started to say: that we come to love those who save us. For although Anna does believe this is true, the word that stuck in her throat was not save but shame.

From this vantage point in the summer, the countryside below is a dreaming checkerboard over which it seems that one could, with a running start, spread one's arms and fly.

For one of the odd things about death, Trudy has discovered, is that in its wake one must go about business as usual; it seems heartless and wrong, but now that the rituals of mourning have been attended to, the sole task left to Trudy is to try and comprehend the enormity of thes sudden change.

The past is past. And better it remain so.

Most of us are drawn to this time period thinking it was a war of absolute good versus absolute evil—qualities rarely found in their purest form—and that's true. But don't forget that history isn't just a study in black and white. Human behavior is comprised of ulterior motives, of gray shades.

Een van de vreemde dingen aan de dood, heeft Trudy ontdekt, is namelijk dat je in het kielzog ervan gewoon verdergaat alsof er niets gebeurd is. Het lijkt harteloos en verkeerd, maar nu de rituelen van de rouw afgehandeld zijn, hoeft Trudy alleen nog maar de enorme omvang van deze plotselinge verandering proberen te bevatten.

Died from eating a Hershey bar.

Thomas cracks his joints on the steering wheel. It's all right. I mean, it's not, but of course you wouldn't know. It's not exactly something I advertise. And I only bring it up now to let you know I'm in your corner. Life is so often unfair and painful and love is hard to find and you have to take it whenever and wherever you can get it, no matter how brief it is or how it ends. So I understand. That's all.

How warm the day can be when the wind is at your back.

Severe weather is just Nature's way of correcting an imbalance.

But I'm going to prove there's a link between storms that rapid-cycle and ones that produce tornadoes because I'm a rapid cycler myself.

The amount of all the pretending she'll have to do exhausts her.

A bereavement club. You don't choose to join it; it's thrust upon you. And the members whose lives have been changed have more knowledge than those who aren't in it, but the price of belonging is so terribly high.