Silence made space for other people's words, which was important for those who needed to be listened to.
She had wondered which was worse: the sudden good-bye you know is a good-bye or the long good-bye you have to guess.
At the landing, Mommy turns to us and says, Let’s let the puppy go pish, so she opens the door and he scoots into the snow outside.
There were two kinds of students who liked the library: those who devoured one book after another and those who savored the same book repeatedly. Now she understood those rereaders differently ... she...
Martha giggled; the baby was holding her. Astounding. A person comes into the world with a fist—and a grasp, she thought. Yes, we are built to fight one another, but also to embrace. How cleverly we a...
Not thinking of what I can get, but thinking of what I can give
But never had come first.
And Lynnie understood. There were two kinds of hope: the kind you couldn't do anything about and the kind you could. And even if the kind you could do something about wasn't what you'd originally want...
When change happened to an individual, it happened to everyone around her - sometimes in ways she wished for, though sometimes in ways she wished againstLynnie p 228-229
How many others are out there? How many other lives are hidden, and hearts are seeking? How many would give anything in the world to be held by the person they love?
Follow your inclination. It will take you to the thoughts you'd never known you'd had.
Maybe this is how it goes, I think, watching Beth and Melanie, remembering the people I have loved, and the ones I wish I hadn't lost. Maybe we are all Beths, boarding other people's life journeys, or...
Looking back in time was very exciting to me. But looking forward is more challenging—nothing unfolds as you anticipate, and it’s the small things, not the huge geologic shifts, that make or break you...
Just because I am not a saint does not mean that I am a demon
I observe that I too must alter my vocabulary. No longer is it proper to say, as I have all my life, that someone is mentally retarded. As I discover on other websites, by using the new People First L...
He thought that maybe when you're making your way forward into your life, it just looks higgledy-piggledy, the way, if you were a fly walking across one of Beautiful Girl's drawings all you'd be able...
And she’d felt an opening in her chest where she hadn’t known anything was closed.
She's sad a lot. She's sad in the way Laura wears glasses and Max has freckles and Beth is retarded. There's no reason, it's just the way it is.
She realized it was not the rereading that led to fresh insights. It was the rereader—because when a person is changing inside, there are inevitably new things to see
Martha sat back. She felt her chest heaving, and in the silence that followed, she looked into Julia’s eyes and saw, past the challenging stance, the self-loathing, the effects of the wine, Lynnie. An...