The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 8

by Beth Brower

Pleased whenever I caught a glimpse of you, as happens when you fancy someone.”

“What do you do with it?” “I wait on the shore of the mystery to see what the tide will bring.”

“It’s your house,” Pierce answered, a shrug in accompaniment. “Do what you like.” Lovely, lovely philosophy.

One’s anonymity is not a thing to give away.

“How is it that the moment Emma Lion becomes part of an equation—almost any equation—every ridiculous prospect becomes reality?”

It is a potent threat, the process of caring for someone at increasing intervals.

We need the tonic of wildness… At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. – Henry David Thoreau

“Wealth, cleverness, and praise are not the same as excellence of character, Emma,” my mother used to tell me. To which my father would say under his breath, “But do also be clever, if you can.”

“All things that love the sun are out of doors.”

And it was Hawkes who spoke. “Do you need us to wait here, do you need us to head for Stonecrop, or do you need us to come with you?”

“What do you need from your friends, Pierce?” Hawkes said. “To wait, to go, or to come?”

had two choices before me. One might define them as Self-Respect and Curiosity. Having respected myself a great deal over the years, I chose the latter.

One should go away long enough to know the cotton-soft contentment of coming home.