More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
She will grow out of it, her parents say—but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter to the stubborn hope of something more.
Kristy Tomasello liked this
Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.
Now that it is gone, there is a guilty gladness tucked among the grief. This last, brittle thread to her old life has broken, and Addie has been set well, and truly, and forcibly free.
One wrong step, and she’ll wake up. One wrong step, and the thread will snap, the curse will shudder back into place, and it will be over, and Henry will be gone, and she will be alone again.
Ideas are wilder than memories.
Because I was a fool. Because I was afraid. Because I wasn’t careful.
His heart has a draft. It lets in light. It lets in storms. It lets in everything.
“No,” he says. “I just want to be alone.” The biggest lie he’s ever told.
“Pain can be beautiful,” he says, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “It can transform. It can create.”
He didn’t realize how much connective tissue was made up of guilt.
The absence of judgment is jarring,
He doesn’t have to lie, doesn’t have to try, doesn’t have to be anyone but himself, because he is enough.
“What a good memory you have.” His fingers curl around her blade, and it begins to rust. “How tiresome that must be.”
He is happy. He is ready. He is not afraid. That is what he tells himself. He is not afraid.
“Nothing is all good or all bad,” she says. “Life is so much messier than that.”
Were the moments of beauty worth the years of pain? And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says, “Always.”
He hopes she is happy. He hopes she is still brimming with defiant joy, and stubborn hope.
