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07852bf
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The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.
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libraries
reading
summer
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Polly Horvath |
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1bbf277
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We all belong here equally...Just by being born onto the earth we are accepted and the earth supports us. We don't have to be especially good. We don't have to accomplish anything. We don't even have to be healthy.
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belonging
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Polly Horvath |
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6a02a27
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Is this what it is to get older, to have adventures you can no longer tell your family because you are moving apart from them?...Or do you grow up and have adventures you tell no one? Are some adventures only yours alone?
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Polly Horvath |
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9e75af9
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There's something about sports. You can be setting fire to cats and burying them in your backyard, but as long as you're playing team sports, people think you're okay.
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sports
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Polly Horvath |
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395c8a1
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I want someone who puts the whole ball of wax at risk. I want the kind of marriage where we would follow each other out into the stormy fatal sea or I'm not marrying at all.
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Polly Horvath |
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c9d78c6
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You can't replace one dog with another any more than you can replace one person with another, but that's not to say you shouldn't get more dogs and people in your life.
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Polly Horvath |
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9fcae70
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Suddenly I realize that everyone in the whole world is, at the end of a day, staring at a dusky horizon, owner of a day that no one else will ever know.
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Polly Horvath |
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4393293
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At heart, we're all violent raging wolves, but in our actions we can be pacifists.
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peace
choices
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Polly Horvath |
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d5581f3
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All my life I had wanted to travel but what I discovered that year was that the things that you find out become the places that you go and sometimes you find them out by being jettisoned off alone and other times it is the people who choose to stand by your side who give you the clues. But the important things that happen to you will happen to you even in the smallest places...
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Polly Horvath |
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f8aef14
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We read a lot of books. Children's books mostly, because they're always much more truthful than adult books. And much more entertaining," said Mrs. Bunny."
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Polly Horvath |
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aff8a21
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The only really interesting thing about someone that makes you want to explore them further is their heart, and Miss Honeycut has a teeny tiny pea-sized one and it takes you nowhere you want to go.
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Polly Horvath |
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086072b
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I am not in the body of life. I hover on the extremities. I float.
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Polly Horvath |
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7e84eb6
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Yesterday I was so full of hope. My life seemed blessed, full of adventures and answered prayers, and now something very, very bad has happened and it will never be the same again. And it all happened because I was greedy. Because I couldn't have an ordinary life. Because I was so taken with the wonders of the world that I could not be content with anything less than the constant awareness of its miracles.
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Polly Horvath |
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6a5a16f
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Sometimes you get tempted to make something wonderful even better but in doing so you lose what was so wonderful to begin with.
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Polly Horvath |
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9ae1f44
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We can affect people around us so much with our moods. A depressed person can make a room gloomy and a sweet nature can cause the lion to lie down with the lamb.
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Polly Horvath |
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1b4b416
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All kinds of ordinary people gave their whole hearts to things you wouldn't think you could give your heart to.
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Polly Horvath |
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9ca1d33
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The richness of our lives depends on what we are willing to notice and what we are willing to believe.
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Polly Horvath |
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32ada4b
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The only really interesting things about someone that makes you want to explore them further is their heart.
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Polly Horvath |
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9d896f9
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And, I often think, the truth isn't good or bad, it's just the truth.
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Polly Horvath |
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f659925
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It's better to be fooled a hundred times than never to look.
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Polly Horvath |
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51fd4a4
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People can be hurt so badly that they choose to just stop in their tracks.
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Polly Horvath |
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7400dec
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I left parts of myself some places and found others unexpectedly. New people appeared on the scene and others disappeared before I had a chance to say goodbye. All kinds of ordinary people gave their whole hearts to things you wouldn't think you could give your heart to.
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Polly Horvath |
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0db1bad
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Don't worry the trolls don't come to you. It's your own darkness that leads you to the trolls.
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Polly Horvath |
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27599fc
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No one really understands a family but the people in it and even they each understand it differently.
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Polly Horvath |
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1e4d9f0
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I think that it is death alone that makes things poignant.
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Polly Horvath |
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7512cfc
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Some people, well, most people just seem to show up on your life with no clear purpose. Have you noticed that? They're like dust mites. You know they're there, you just don't know what to do about them.
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Polly Horvath |
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04aeba7
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When you're a child you never figure a grownup is going to be jealous of . It's the grownups who seem to have everything. Children give adults far too much credit.
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Polly Horvath |
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98bb5f0
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My mother smoked too but I guessed by now she had quit the habit, which was, I supposed, one of the advantages of being shipwrecked.
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Polly Horvath |
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c294e19
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T)he only really interesting thing about someone that makes you want to explore them further is their heart
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Polly Horvath |
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d41a4a6
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It's not the natural disasters you have to fear. It's the ones that are inside of you, waiting to happen.
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Polly Horvath |
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887c84a
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And Mrs. Treaclebunny has promised to speak English from now on as well. In fact, she said when she goes to England, that's all she speaks anyway because the animals speak English there. She says anyone who has read children's books with animals in them set in England would know that. Is The Wind in the Willows written in Mole with a little Ratty thrown in? Is Winnie-the-Pooh written in Bear? No, it's English, because that's what the animal..
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Polly Horvath |
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00773ec
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Being together, like being able to see certain stars only with your peripheral vision, isn't something you can create. It's just something that happens to you.
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Polly Horvath |
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2839702
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You can be sunk low or as a skunk and still have a joy in your heart. Joy lives like one of those spinning things---a gyroscope in your heart. It doesn't seem to have any connection to circumstance, good or bad.
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Polly Horvath |
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6a4f685
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She was alone in the stillness of the universe a little while before all the confusion began. It was if she could hear it ticking, check in on the life at the very center of it, its wellspring that everyone somehow knows, before it was covered by noise.
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Polly Horvath |
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389c7aa
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But it didn't matter. Because all it proved was that my mother was sitting out there coatless somewhere, waiting to come home to me. Even as he stared at it, the remark "Your mother's dead" sitting unspoken, like something rotten in our path that neither one of us wanted to be the first to pick up. Even after the kind of day I had had, being taunted at school, and then threatened with incarceration. Even know that when I went home I would f..
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Polly Horvath |
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27d9f9d
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I would never go home again in quite the same way, but that was okay too.
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Polly Horvath |
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194154d
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I think part of her feared that if Mother could leave her that way, she must be unlovable. And of course, she wasn't.
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Polly Horvath |
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b5876f8
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All summers take me back to the sea. There in the long eelgrass, like birds' eggs waiting to be hatched, my brothers and sister and I sit, grasses higher than our heads, arms and legs like thicker versions of the grass waving in the wind, looking up at the blue sky. My mother is gathering food for dinner: clams and mussels and the sharply salty greens that grow by the shore. It is warm enough to lie here in the little silty puddles like bat..
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stars
life
moon
summer-begins
sea
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Polly Horvath |
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7a5099c
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I keep staring at the bag in Mrs. Parks's hand: yellows, greens, blues, whites, pastel colors so soft they look as if they have faded in the sea. The washed colors of the sea and sleep. Pajama colors. The colors of baby clothes. In my nose is the smell of my brothers' heads after they are born. Maybe this is why people making journeys buy saltwater taffy. It gives you the lovely dreamy sense that you can start all over again from the beginn..
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sleep
dream
pajama
saltwater-taffy
beginning
sea
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Polly Horvath |
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84f05b2
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It is never a bad thing to take up your fair share of space," said Mr. Bunny ambiguously."
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image-about-yourself
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Polly Horvath |
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7408571
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It disguises itself as motor vehicle knowledge, but really it's physics, which any other time would be fascinating but not right now, not while you're trying to learn to drive.
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Polly Horvath |