Quotes from Susan Fletcher

But maybe the best thing I learnt was this: that we cannot know a person's soul and nature until we've sat beside them, and talked.

I believe the world is as we choose to view it. Simple as that. Our happiness is, in the end, up to us, and to no one else.

I believe the world is as we choose to view it. Simple as that. Our happiness is, in the end, up to us, and to no one else.

We carry on. We have ourselves and we carry on- in spite of our losses and mistakes and women, I think, have more than most. We are good secret-keepers. We can tie weights to out guilt and passions, and hatred and deceitfulness, and let them sink down, so that you'd never know they existed at all. But we know. I can count all mine.

There are moments. You will know them.

Perfection is a moving target

If you let words go buzzing out of your mouth like bees, she always told me, they will come back and sting you.

Imagine it. Use all your strength and imagine it exactly. And it will happen that way.

There are some stories that you don't tell aloud, that you make up and tell silently to yourself.

Stories are thick with meanings. You can fall in love with a story for what you think it says, but you can't know for certain where it will lead your listeners. If you're telling a tale to teach children to be generous, they may fix instead on the part where your hero hides in an olive jar, then spend the whole next day fighting about who gets to try it first. People take what they need from the stories they hear. The tale is often wiser than the teller.

My auntie Chava used to tell me to chew my words before letting them out. "Seven times, Majan," she would say. "Chew them seven times.

Mr Phipps seemed to think criminality was passed down through the generations like a stutter, or a squint, or in my case red hair.

We have our stories, and we speak of them, and weave them into other people's stories - that's how it goes, does it not?

Love is blind, they say. But isn't it more that love makes us see too much? Isn't it more that love floods our brain with sights and sounds, so that everything looks bigger, brighter, more lovely than ever before?

You're the one who taught me that there is truth below the surface of tales. That we can learn courage from them. That they can teach us how to live our lives.

There is not one wide happiness that reaches us all at the same time.

Those moments that we remember. The tiniest moments or parts of a moment - a tap of a nail against a mug or the sound of a man swallowing, or how the sweeping beam finds the kitchen walls and then leaves them. We count the seconds, he and I.

I hoarded all the stories that reflected the light and dazzled me.

And in my head I laid out the stories the islanders told me... the flakes of silver, the seals who are wiser than humans, the girl who floated like a patchwork star.

Love is too small a word - too small.

Feathers... drift on the water like dreams.

So I was for stories. I was for stries just as gannets were for balls of silver-flashing fish - I'd crash towards them, gaping. I'd try for as many as I could. And I'd keep them safe like feathers in a vase... They have been my comfort. My family. My strange nourishment.

Tell me about Stackpole then... Like I am now, but smaller.

I want him to see me as I saw him then. I want him to find me alone at the end of the day with the sun in my hair. I want his heart to buckle, too.