A Summer to Die

by Lois Lowry

It’s important, I think, to have places like that in your life, secrets that you share only by choice.

it was full of memories; let’s face it, some memories are better off forgotten, especially when you haven’t lived far enough beyond them yet.

How can you learn anything if you won’t take risks?”

Well, things change. I just have to learn to adjust to what they change to.

It is so good to have friends who understand how there is a time for crying and a time for laughing, and that sometimes the two are very close together.

Margaret, are you grieving over Goldengrove unleaving?’” Will asked. “What?” I was puzzled. He never called me Margaret; what was he talking about? He smiled. “It’s a poem by Hopkins. Your father would know. ‘It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for,’” he went on. “Not me,” I told him arrogantly. “I never mourn for myself.” “We all do, Meg,” Will said. “We all do.”

That you want to know why, why life sometimes ends too soon, but no one can answer that.”

TIME GOES ON, AND YOUR life is still there, and you have to live it. After a while you remember the good things more often than the bad. Then, gradually, the empty silent parts of you fill up with sounds of talking and laughter again, and the jagged edges of sadness are softened by memories.