The Blue Hour

by Paula Hawkins

Chapman poses questions about inclusion and exclusion, about what we hide and what we reveal, where we are generous and where we are withholding, about what we make and what we leave behind.

Pain is clear, grief a fog. Solitude, too, is clarifying, revelatory. Love, like grief, obscures. Creation from destruction takes courage; it is an act of will, it is violent, like hope.

you are doing that thing you love, and then someone—not always a man, I suppose, but usually a man—comes along and transforms it into an ugly place. And you never feel safe there again. And you are never the same again. The place is changed and you are changed, and neither for the better.”