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Everybody has thoughts that shame them. You can’t control them coming in. But you don’t have to let them all out. That’s the crux of it. That’s what made for civilization,
Maddy likes people who are a little fat; it seems to her that they are approachable.
He taught her one of her favorite words: hiraeth, a Welsh word that means a homesickness for a home you cannot return to, or that maybe never was; it means nostalgia and yearning and grief for lost places.
She doesn’t exactly know why kids don’t like her. She’s good-looking enough. She has a sense of humor. She’s not dumb. She guesses it’s because they can sense how much she needs them. They are like kids in a circle holding sticks, picking on the weak thing. It is in people, to be entertained by cruelty.
Funny how an animal can hurt your feelings when you’re all alone.
He’ll plant the tomato seeds he bought to start in little Dixie cups. It makes him feel like the Lord above when those things sprout. A man may not have a whole vegetable garden, but a man needs his fresh tomatoes in the summer.
Arthur realizes that if he were alone, it would be a grim wait. With the girl, it is an adventure.
Maybe it’s foolish. But I’m in love. We both are. With each other.” “I don’t think it’s foolish. I don’t think love is ever foolish.”
Arthur starts rocking, too. “I suppose we might be old-fashioned, but I don’t think love is. Who doesn’t need it? We all of us need it, especially those who say they don’t. It’s like oil in the crankcase, we can’t run without it.”
“I guess each person deals with death in their own way. Me, I can’t stop talking about Nola. I guess it keeps her alive for me.”
It took a long time for him to shift things around so that he could still love and honor Nola but also love and honor life, but it happened. And it will happen to her.
He watches Lucille eat a little faster, his heart aching. It’s something to feed someone who is so in need of eating. It’s something to feed somebody, period.
He stops his rocking to look over at her. “But what we need are readers. Right? Where would writers be without readers? Who are they going to write for? And actors, what are they without an audience? Actors, painters, dancers, comedians, even just ordinary people doing ordinary things, what are they without an audience of some sort? “See, that’s what I do. I am the audience. I am the witness. I am the great appreciator, that’s what I do and that’s all I want to do.
Think about it. To know you’re at the end of hoping for love and to realize that something else will have to do, if you’re going to have any reason to go on.
She sits in the desk chair holding the photo, a bit overwhelmed. In many respects, sorrow and disappointment are easier for her to handle than this outpouring of attention and affection that she has been offered by these two old people.
Arthur has had friends die, he has visited them in hospitals near the end, and always he saw something when people were ready: a gentle turning-away-from. And what he always hoped was that in turning away, they were also turning toward. For everything there truly is a season; if his life’s work has not taught him that, it has taught him nothing. The birth of spring, the fullness of summer, the push of glory in the fall, the quiet of winter.
What is it that makes a family? Certainly no document does, no legal pronouncement or accident of birth. No, real families come from choices we make about who we want to be bound to, and the ties to such families live in our hearts. Beneath the quote, Maddy has written, Thank you for inviting my father, who is not my real family, but to whom I am also tied.
right on the N for Nola Corrine, the Beauty Queen. “I’ll love you forever in darkness and sun, I’ll love you past when my whole sweet life is done,” he says.
And there it is, slow to come today, but there it is, the feeling of her inside him. She blooms in his heart, and he is suddenly warm.
He says, “Nola once told me she wished people could be stars in the sky and look down on those that they loved. I always wished that could be so. Let’s you and I pretend it’s true, even if it isn’t, would that be okay with you?” Maddy nods, her throat tight. “And after I die, why, you look up in the sky for two stars, real close together. That will be Nola and me. Those stars will be so close together, it’ll look like they are one, but they’ll be two. Me, and then just to my right, Nola. Look up at us sometimes.”
