Quotes from Carolyn Parkhurst

You believe, fervently, that falling in love is the one holy mystery in an otherwise secular life.

Like every parent, you have to teach your girl to live a contradiction, to be exceptional and ordinary, all at the same time.

You picture a garden gone to seed: moss growing on the surface of our spleens, vines squeezing our kidneys. Tiny mushrooms spreading across the linings of our intestines.

The conclusion I have reached is that, above all, dogs are witnesses. They are allowed access to our most private moments. They are there when we think we are alone.

I'm talking about narratives of tragedy and pathos so painful, so compelling, that they seem to catch inside you on a tiny hook you didn't even know you'd hung.

Read my story, walk through these woods, and when you get to the other side, you may not even realize that you're carrying something out that you didn't have when you went in. A little tick of an idea, clinging to your scalp or hidden in a fold of skin. Somewhere out of sight. By the time you discover it, it's already begun to prey on you; perhaps it's merely gouged your flesh, or perhaps it's already begun to nibble away at your central nervous system.

The conclusion I have reached is that, above all, dogs are witnesses. They are allowed access to our most private moments. They are there when we think we are alone. Think of what they could tell us. They sit on the laps of presidents. They see acts of love and violence, quarrels and feuds, and the secret play of children. If they could tell us everything they have seen, all of the gaps of our lives would stitch themselves together.

It's not the content of our dreams that gives our second heart its dark color; it's the thoughts that go through our heads in those wakeful moments when sleep won't come. And those are the things we never tell anyone at all.

It's true, isn't it, that each of us has two hearts? The secret heart, curled behind like a fist, living gnarled and shrunken beneath the plain, open one we use every day.

How can it be, I wondered, that we can be lying in bed next to a person we love wholly and helplessly, a person we love more than our own breath, and still ache to think of the one who caused us pain all those years ago? It's the betrayal of this second heart of ours, its flesh tied off like a fingertip twined tightly round with a single hair, blue-tinged from lack of blood. The shameful squeeze of it.

I remember my wife in white.' It just made people weep to hear it...Everybody just thought it was the saddest sentence that was ever written. And it didn't matter if I never wrote another word. This one sentence had put an end to the need for any future sentences. I had said it all.

There would be hard times, but what did I care if we had hard times? The branches of my love were wide, and they caught the rain and the snow. We would be okay, the two of us together. We would be okay.

It's gratifying to know that you've appeared in someone else's dreams. It's proof that you exist, in a way, proof that you have substance and value outside the walls of your own mind.

It was September, and there was a crackly feeling to the air. I was saying something that was making her laugh, and I couldn't stop looking at her. It was a little bit chilly, and her cheeks were pink, and her dark hair was flowing around her face. All I wanted for the rest of my life was to keep making her laugh like that. Sometimes our arms brushed against each other as we walked, and it was like I could feel the touch for minutes after it happened.

Perhaps she saw before her a lifetime of walking on the ruined earth and chose instead a single moment in the air.

Because for most of us, suicide is a moment we'll never choose. It's only for people like Lexy, who know they might choose eventually, who believe they have a choice to make.

I can't take one breath, not one single breath, without knowing that I love you.

And sitting here now, with all of Lexy's dreams in my lap, I realize there are things about her I will never know. It's not the content of our dreams that gives our second heart its dark color; it's the thoughts that go through our heads in those wakeful moments when sleep won't come. And those are the things we never tell anyone at all.

I sing of a woman with ink on her hands and pictures hidden beneath her hair. I sing of a dog with skin like velvet pushed the wrong way.I sing of the shape a fallen body makes in the dirt beneath a tree, and I sing of an ordinary man who is wanted to know things no human being could tell him.This is the true beginning.

It is not the content of our dreams that gives our second heart is dark color: it's the thoughts that go through our heads in those wakeful moments when sleep won't come. And those are the things we never tell anyone at all.

I'm not going to feel guilty for wanting the things that everyone wants.

I wake up in that state of grief when you can tell you've been mourning even in your sleep.

You are my finest knight

The conclusion I have reached is that, above all, dogs are witnesses.