Quotes from Cathie Pelletier

Now I'll give you some advice, since you been asking for it. Happiness is like them plants you been yapping about. Sometimes it's growing right in your own backyard and you don't even know it.

Peace of mind comes in the strangest boxes.

Now I'll give you some advice, since you been asking for it. Happiness is like them plants you been yapping about. Sometimes it's growing right in your own backyard and you don't even know it.

Nobody likes for the hero to walk away.

I know how loud the seconds can sound as you stand by a window and peer out into the night.

There were worse things than being young and foolish.

He felt the rush of years, years wasted and years used wisely. He felt time moving through him, as if it were a ghost, a thing that can haunt a man's days and nights.

Never had anyone said, Listen. Life is short. Pretend your body is still in its twenties. Jump for the brass ring. Swing for those bleachers. Dive into the deep end of the pool. Act like a fool if you must, but at least *live*.

Everything seemed to be a clue to the hereafter, now that one of her own had gone there.

This is what keeps ghosts locked to the earth, that sweet burning need for something they loved and gave up too soon.

caught up in the exciting world of adults and their antics

Sometimes, in the dark of night, when no one else could hear him but me, he'd cry out, like he was fighting some silent little war in his head.

It wasn't that Mattie didn't believe in God. She did, she most surely did. She just didn't like some of the things He did, is all.

The years of her life tumbled out onto the floor like marbles that she would never be able to gather up again in one bowl. The years of her life had been a made puzzle that one day gets unmade, the pieces all scattered.

She knew for certain there were all kinds of people who craved their youth, who would run like gazelles toward that fishhook of time, peeling off the years like old imagined skins.

When you don't know enough about life to know what you might have missed out on, your imagination plays wicked tricks on you.

Sometimes you need to be touched to know you're still alive.

Americans look for heroes in the strangest of places.

He had lived as a handful of taffy between his mother and his father all his life, had been pulled in so many directions, stretched here and there, that all he could do was plaster a mighty smile on his face.

Only Gracie knew what it was like to wake up at night and feel how cold sheets can get on the empty side of a bed.

looking off at the past as though it were a place one might still get to

You don't jump off a bridge by mistake.

talking above the pain of his broken heart

the sort of kid who steered his bicycle around snakes crossing the road