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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, what was left of it, anyway.
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.
So much of everything is what you call it.
Arthur thinks that, above all, aging means the abandonment of criticism and the taking on of compassionate acceptance.
“Look for the helpers,” he advised. “If you look for the helpers, you’ll know that there’s hope.”
People who don’t feel cared for are not always comfortable being cared for.
“What girls do to each other is beyond description. No Chinese torture comes close.”
And the winner is: Maddy Harris! And here’s how it works: When she says her own name in her mind, she, too, feels a revulsion. They have persuaded her onto their side, though they do
not let her belong with them. In this way, she does belong with them.
Wow. How cruel we are to one another.
“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.”
“Oh, Arthur, no one even sees you when you get old except for people who knew you when you were young.”
“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. I worked for a lot of years. I did a lot of things for a lot of years. Now, well, here I am in the rocking chair, and I don’t mind it, Lucille. I don’t feel useless. I feel lucky.”
Who cares what happens before we’re born and after we die? The question is, what do we do in the meantime?
But the longer I live, the more I come to see that love is not so easy for everyone. It can get awfully complicated. It can make us do good things but it can also make us do bad things.
And he sure enough did, and he told her so. The one to tell. The one to be told by. For him, that was marriage.
To learn that someone living in the same house with you has been feeling so alone and you didn’t even know!
if you can’t forgive everything, you can’t forgive anything.
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.
“Nola once told me she wished people could be stars in the sky and look down on those that they loved.
I think the kind of love that comes after romantic love is the best, richest love of all. At some point, I think we all want someone we can look ugly around, reveal our vulnerabilities to, and, most important, trust. And as a former nurse, I found that when people are at their most vulnerable, at their “ugliest,” is when they’re the most beautiful. In this novel, I think true love is saying, “I see you wholly and I love you anyway.”
