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believed if an incident could not be explained, then the cause was something wicked, and that cause was often a woman who was said to be a witch. Women who did as they pleased, women with property, women who had enemies, women who took lovers, women who knew about the mysteries of childbirth, all were suspect, especially to the fiercest and cruelest judge in the area, John Hathorne, a man so terrible that his great-great-grandson, the author of The Scarlet Letter, tried to deny his own heritage by changing the spelling of his name.
When you are young you are looking forward and when you are old you are looking back.
Her one salvation was the novels she read. On nights when she thought it might be better not to be alive without Levi in the world, she opened a book and was therefore saved, discovering that a novel was as great an escape as any spell.
In 1794, Aaron Burr changed the course of the stream, so his own nearby property would have a pond, and later, when the city began encroaching upon the creek, muskrats still abounded. It was an extraordinary place, but it also held great sorrow, for Minetta Creek, known by the Indian people as Devil’s Water, was a boundary for a cemetery that was in use from 1797 to 1826, a potter’s field where twenty thousand bodies were buried and where they rested, uneasily or not, to this day. The Hangman’s Elm, said to be over three hundred years old, stood in the northwest corner of Washington Square
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The Village felt like a sleepy town. It was a different city here; the buildings were smaller and it was possible to see the sky. No one cared what you looked like or what you wore. Franny stopped at a café for a strong cup of coffee. Listening to the waiters argue in Italian, she felt transported. She went to a flower shop and bought a rose that was so dark it appeared black. At last she turned onto Greenwich Avenue and there she stopped. She had come upon a tilted little house that had a For Sale sign in the street-level window where there had once been a shop. There was a school next door
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Things without all remedy should be without regard. But what you can cure, do so willingly. What ails the human body and soul may be difficult to diagnose, but just as often there is a simple resolution.
Remind customers they must be careful what they wish for, Isabelle instructed. What’s done cannot be undone. What’s set into motion takes on a life of its own.
She had lost so much that she had lost herself as well. She had a secret that she carried with her, and it hurt, as if she stored a stone beside her heart. It was her hatred of herself that was her burden, and it grew each day. At first it was tiny, a mere pebble, then it was as big as her heart, and then it was the largest thing inside her. She had decided it wasn’t the curse that was at fault. It was her.
“We make our own fate,” Jet said, and then all at once she realized that they did. They could not control it, but they could choose how to respond to what happened.
Vincent listened to the poets who had no hope of ever making it, and those who were on the cusp of changing the meaning of what poetry was and could be. Whenever possible he caught Bob Dylan at Gerde’s. Dylan was making his mark as a poet and musician with a voice that was unmistakably his own. That was true beauty. That was the map of one’s soul. To do so meant to reveal some inner part of yourself, and that Vincent was unable to do.
everyone knew a dog was an antidote to alienation.
If there was anything Vincent might have done to stop it he wouldn’t have done so, for this occurred only once in a person’s life, and then only if he was lucky. It happened the way things happen in a dream. A door opens, a person calls your name, your heart beats faster, and everything is familiar, yet you don’t know where you are. You are falling, you’re in a house you don’t recognize and yet you want to be here, you have actually wanted to be here all of your life.
Maybe everyone is cursed. Maybe it’s the human condition. Maybe it’s what we want.”
“Always remember,” he whispered, “live a lot.”
Love had to happen without any certainty, the ultimate leap of faith.
“Unable are the Loved to die, for Love is Immortality,” Jet said, quoting Emily Dickinson.
“I know exactly who you are,” William responded. “Just as I always knew who my father was. And I loved him, not despite it, but because of it, the way that I love you because of who you are.”
A one-line message was never good. It meant there was no recourse to something that had gone wrong. For what you can fix, there are a hundred remedies. For what cannot be cured, not even words will do.
If there are lilacs, her aunt had told her once as they’d worked in the garden, there will be luck.
Isabelle was honest above all things, a trait Franny admired. It was an important rule. Nature could be shifted, but not controlled.
She didn’t understand that when you truly love someone and they love you in return, you ruin your lives together. That is not a curse, it’s what life is, my girl. We all come to ruin, we turn to dust, but whom we love is the thing that lasts.”
“I just do the best I can to face what life brings. That’s the secret, you know. That’s the way you change your fate.”
In this short Life That only lasts an hour How much—how little—is Within our power.
If there be a cure, seek till you find it. If there be none, never mind it.
It was an ending and a beginning, for the month itself was like a gate. October began as a golden hour and ended with Samhain, the day when the worlds of the living and the dead opened to each other. There was no choice but to walk through the gate of time.
Life is a mystery, and it should be so, for the sorrow that accompanies being human and the choices one will have to make are a burden, too heavy for most to know before their time comes.
Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.
We were wrong about Maria’s curse. It is simply the way of the world to lose everything you have ever loved. In this, we are like everyone else.
Isn’t that what love makes you do? Go on trying, even when you’re through, Go on even when you’re made of ash, when there’s nothing inside you but the past.
Paris is sad, she wrote, but beautiful enough to make you not care about sadness.
Fate is what you make it.
As for Franny, what she remembered most was standing outside on the sidewalk, looking up at the windows, knowing that lilacs grew here and that she would buy this house and that for a while they would live here and try to be happy, and, in a way, they were.
The attic, where they’d spent their first summer, was a place for young girls, not for grown women who needed more comfortable beds,
They didn’t need the sight to know how one another felt.
He carried the burden of his family with him and was weighed down by the wrong they’d done in the world.
When spring came around, and the lilacs bloomed, Franny began to leave blank journals on the bureau in Maria’s room in the library, and every week they were taken home by girls who questioned their worth in the modern world. Walking past Leech Lake, Franny often spied one or two perched on a rock, writing furiously in their journals, clearly convinced that words could save them.
“If you write it all down, it doesn’t hurt as much.”
Love more, her aunt had said. Not less.
There, behind glass, she kept belladonna; hemlock; nightshade, which could induce visions and was said to be in the ointment that allowed witches to fly; henbane, known as black nightshade, used by men to attract women and by women to bring rain; mandrake, an herb said to scream when plucked from the ground by its roots; thorn apple, used for healing and for breaking hexes, but only in tiny amounts, otherwise death might result.
This is one thing I didn’t wish to share with you. The human body is so fragile, but more and more I think the soul has real possibilities.
In truth it is easier to let your old life disappear in order to start anew.
She felt Vincent’s presence in the world, in the beauty of the evening and in the sunflowers Madame Durant had had sent over in a glass vase. That was the message, that bouquet, the most Madame would tell her.
an emerald, which some people say is much preferable to a diamond, for it causes love to last.
Unable are the Loved to die, for Love is Immortality,
Her daughters, Sally and Gillian, were thirteen months apart, as different as chalk from cheese, but best friends all the same,
a late start means an ending that will be right on time.”
She thought children were better behaved if they had a little fear and respect. But rules were never the point. It was finding out who you were.
All the same, there were some things they needed to learn. Do not
drink milk after a thunderstorm, for it will certainly be sour. Always leave out seed for the birds when the first snow falls. Wash your hair with rosemary. Drink lavender tea when you cannot sleep. Know that the only remedy for love is to love more.
