She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls' hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.
I got to thinking--when it was too late--you have to reach out to people. To your family, too. You can't just let them sit there, you should put your hand out. If they slap it back, well you reach out again if you care enough. If you don't care enough, you forget about them, if you can.
The people they had been last summer, the person she had been--Dicey guessed she'd never be afraid again, not the way she had been all summer. She had taken care of them all, sometimes well, sometimes badly. And they had covered the distances. For most of the summer, they had been unattached. Nobody knew who they were or what they were doing. It didn't matter what they did, as long as they all stayed together. Dicey remembered that feeli..
Mina wanted some of the kind of love Momma gave to her children, where love was the first and deepest thing, and the questions came later and the answers wouldn't matter much measured up against the love.
I felt that the world itself had changed and that it would never be steady under my feet again. I felt I understood nothing of people and had no way to learn. I felt fear. Until you have felt fear, you cannot imagine it. Once you have really felt it, you know that all your earlier nervousness was but a pale shadow.
Even after everyone had gone home, the house was filled with the good time they'd had, as if it could linger in the air like the voices and music lingered in memory. Mina wrapped the memory up and put it in her heart; there was a quiet gladness, deep like a tree and tall in her
Behind the mask Jackaroo wore, there could be a face of bone, its flesh long since eaten away. Jackaroo could fight as a trained soldier, with swords and shield; he could ride a horse like a Lord; and he had the knowledge of letters which only the Lords held.
Mina wanted some of the kind of love Momma gave to her children, wheere love was the first and deepest thing, and the questions came later and the answers wouldn't matter much measured up against the love.
Oriel didn't move. But inside of his head, all was movement, like a river running over rapids, searching for the way through, trying routes around rocks and over shallows, a turbulence of thought more rapid than he could follow. Griff, he knew, would do and say nothing until he heard Oriel's choice.
When a daring idea first crosses one's mind, if it is to be realized in the future it is often appealing. Then, as the time for its execution comes nearer, one begins to dread that which had once been anticipated.
Where the veil broke, you could see silvery clouds on which tall angels might stand. Not cute little Christmas angels, but high, stern angels in white robes, whose faces were sad and serious from being near God all day and hearing His decisions about the world.
Your grandmother thought--no, she believed, it was like a faith for her. She believed it the way some people believe in God or science. She believed that it was the rules that made her life so easy. She thought life was about the rules people make for it, as if life was some kind of a board game and if you had a little luck, and you kept to the rules, you'd end up winning. Or maybe she thought it was like a game of solitaire and once the ca..
He held the whip that and made those marks, and drawn that blood, and he was ashamed. He held the whip that could make more marks on the flesh of Nikol's back. While Nikol begged.
Is there such a thing?' Birle asked. He looked thoughtfully at her, but not as if he saw her. 'Men have dreamed of it, although none has ever held it in his hand, not to my knowledge. I cannot say that there is such a thing, no. But equally I cannot say there is not. Why should a man be able to dream of it if it cannot be? If it is so impossible, then what put's it into a man's mind? Greed puts many things into men's mind, and fear does too..
He felt -- washed clean, healed. He felt if he could just live here he would be all right. He felt as if he had never been alive before. He felt at ease with himself and as if he had come home to a place where he could be himself, without hiding anything, without pretending even to himself. He felt, thinking his way back up the beach, as if his brain had just woken up from some long sleep, and it wanted to run along beside the waves, to see..
To himself, he called it a safe place, and when they were finally settled in at the end of July, living in the three-room house where windows gave out over the water and woods and sky, he knew he had been right.
All she knew was that his smile lit up the morning as the rising sun does. For a moment, looking at his face, it was as if her ribs were empty, hollow, as if the world had stopped forever while she looked into his eyes as blue as the bellflowers that grew wild across the meadows. For a moment, just until her beating heart had returned to her chest, Birle had thought she understood everything about herself she had never understood before.
Beriel shone with it, like a sun, the Queen in her Kingdom. It was as if each breath she drew increased her pleasure, breathing that air. It was as if each hoof the chestnut planted onto the earth increased her strength.
It took another time, more waves rolling up, to understand that he had no idea what it would be like to live without fear at his elbow, warning him, keeping him safe, keeping him frightened.
If they were afloat on the sea, and blind in the fog -- they didn't even know what direction they should turn in. What then did it matter that she knew reading and writing, or that he had been caught out in a plot against his overlord?
Maybeth always did that, brought her good news to the table and held it out, like a little kid holding out her hand, then unwrapping her fingers to show some treasure, some stone or flower. She held her good news out to them all, giving it to them.
He was wrong, somehow, and he wanted to be all right, but it was almost as if there was some secret nobody would tell him, so he was always going to be stuck outside.
Griff had the guarded face of a man who had much to lose by the wrong choice, although he had never had anything to lose. Griff's smile visited his face like a stranger who was only asking directions on his way through to another town.
I persist in examining Mumma from all of the angles available to me I will learn. Not learn how to be a good mother to Sarah, who abandoned me on the sidewalk in front of the school building on the first day of kindergarten ("I don't need a mother any more"), but rather, to understand her, to know when to stand at her shoulder, when to sit in the stands and cheer her on, when to place myself squarely behind her, and when to throw myself in ..