Mockingbird Summer

by Lynda Rutledge

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

Everybody’s got their own story, she realized as she locked eyes with the driver of a passing car . . . and they’re swirling around me every moment of every day.

And that was the problem with lies; they usually begat other lies, and you had to keep them all straight,

underdeveloped teenage prefrontal cortex,

“Here’s the thing to remember about normal. In big times of change, normal is what is being changed.

“It feels like . . . like I can move as fast as the world is turning and I can feel it through my toes . . . Yet it’s also like I’m somehow stopping time and I’m the only thing moving and any moment I could lift off like a bird, as if I’ve got wings on my feet . .

“And inside me, the whole time,” America went on, the smile broader, dreamier, “I feel this huge, blessed bliss . . . like . . . like . . . at any moment I just might burst into some kind of Almighty glory . . .”

The chasm that stretches between thirteen and sixteen is a wide one—at that age, the gap as wide as a decade, every day, every minute, changing you where you stand.

from years to train tracks,

He’s got to have somebody feeling worse than him to feel good himself.

It was the first time Corky thought maybe she didn’t know herself very well. Or, worse, she didn’t know the person she was turning into.

And what did she know if she didn’t know herself?

Compared to the problems of the screwed-up world, he knew his problems were small. But they were his. And he couldn’t ignore them much longer.

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

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

A good novel is not about something, it is something,

those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

“Don’t make me repeat myself.” —History

progress is a forever thing, isn’t it?

A truth that happens to also be true