The Strange Journey of Alice Pendelbury

by Marc Levy

I think it’s phony to force oneself to be jolly just because it happens to be marked on the calendar.”

The truth isn’t engraved in stone, you know. Your future depends on your choices, on your will. It belongs to you.”

I smell the passage of time the way that others watch the changing colors of a sunset, distinguishing dozens of notes—rain dripping off leaves and filtering through moss, grass drying in the summer sun, the straw in the barns where we used to play hide-and-seek, the manure pile you pushed me into that time, or the branch of lilac blossoms you gave me on my sixteenth birthday.

Brutality is just the result of frustration, the incapacity to express oneself in words. Without words, people often resort to fists.”

I think one person’s courage can defeat the complacency of a thousand others.

“Don’t you mean for it to last?” asked Alice. “Of course I do, but do you? You don’t even know all of my bad habits. Maybe with time, you won’t put up with them anymore . . .” “But I don’t know all of your good habits yet either.” “I hadn’t thought of that.”