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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Once upon a time, a girl was forgot.
But Mother could not unbecome herself, so Alice was resigned to loving and disliking her just as she was, for as long as she could bear it.
mean words tasted so much worse than his stupid ears
She could hear his heart again and she was immediately thrown by the beauty of it. The songs of his soul; the harmony within him: It was incredible.
“Unfold your heart. Sharpen your ears. And never say no to the world when it asks you to dance.”
He was fighting a losing battle with the butterfly, which had very obviously fallen in love with him. It was a silly thing to do, talking to butterflies. Falling in love was their favorite way to pass the time.
Best to introduce yourself to patience now, so that it might find you when you call upon it later.”
Love had made her fearless, and wasn’t it strange? It was so much easier to fight for another than it was to fight for oneself.)
She wore her worries like a cloak clasped tight around her throat but, come fear or failure, Alice would tread cautiously into the night. There would be no turning back.
Loving Father meant loving all of him—his open windows as well as his dusty corners—and she refused to love him less for secrets unknown. Alice had secrets, too, didn’t she? And she was beginning to realize that part of growing up meant growing tender, and that secrets were sometimes wrapped around tender things to keep them safe.
(you’ll find that young people are very good at spotting old things),
“Right.” Alice nodded. “So, just to be clear: You enslave us, work us nearly to death, sell us, and only then do you eat us.” “Why, Ms. Queensmeadow, when you put it like that it sounds almost inhumane—”
So she couldn’t have known then that Oliver’s lies were motivated not by cruelty, but by fear. Fear of rejection, of abandonment, of interminable loneliness. There was very little she knew about his interior life, simply because she’d never asked.
Alice was injured on the inside; and though her anger kept her upright, it couldn’t keep her steady,
“Why must you look like the rest of us? Why do you have to be the one to change? Change the way we see. Don’t change the way you are.”
And because she was a girl made of more heart than hurt, she forgave him on the condition that he, too, forgive her.
The simple truth was that Alice would always be different—but to be different was to be extraordinary, and to be extraordinary was an adventure. It no longer mattered how the world saw her; what mattered was how Alice saw herself. Alice would choose to love herself, different and extraordinary, every day of the week.
