Mockingbird Summer

by Lynda Rutledge

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. —Anaïs Nin May you live in interesting times. —Ancient Curse

“A book, like music, is very personal. You bring yourself, your own story, to everything you read. It’s a book’s boon and bane. But it’s also its raison d’être—its reason for being—to meet you where you are. Exactly like a great piece of music.”

There is a young moment when the world can suddenly reveal that it doesn’t revolve around you.

He knew that the only way to not be afraid of the world and people different from me was to go see it and go meet them,”

But the people you come to love early, the ones who help shape you into the person you become, never truly leave you, I don’t think. And as time keeps passing, those are the ones who come naturally to mind, the ones you’d love to see once more.

Unlike the end of a book that wraps up all the loose ends, though, real life, its loose ends dangling everywhere, always goes on.

“What you make of tragedy is what makes you.”

Hope, as we get older, often feels like a thing reserved only for the young.

Because while a journalist’s job is to tell what is true, a novelist’s job is to tell what is truth, to create a world in which you’d want to live, in which everything is just, even if only in the end.