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Kindle Notes & Highlights
A love like that doesn’t falter, doesn’t die beneath the weight of ordinary things. But oh, it does, it’s the ordinary things that kill us all.
the single hag stone that hung on a length of leather around Liv’s neck.
Violent men smelled like fire, the sharp soot of the match striking flint. A kind man gave off an odor of freshly tilled soil.
Those seconds as I was falling…”
“Were the most alive I’ve ever felt.”
She wondered what sorts of things he did as a psychiatrist, how long his reach had become.
‘Once fractured, a bone will never be the same,’
We are broken, torn down, sometimes ruined in this long walk to the grave, and every wound, every bruise and heartbreak changes us. Remember that. What once was will never be again.’
‘Your body knows, Volva,’ George used to tell her. ‘Your body knows what the mind can’t see.’
Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,
“Failure is not what’s at stake. It’s the purity of our hearts. If we compromise that, we are lost.”
How could a black cat and a trunk possibly foretell his future?
“When we die, we step through the veil. Our memories of a thousand lives are restored. We See, truly See. When you die and return to the land of flesh, your eye remains open.”
“Sure, a costume party and a curse. This will be quite a Halloween.”
He often spoke of emotion as a spirit who crept into the body and stole reason. The spirit rejoiced in chaos. If Liv cried, the spirit would celebrate and return again to steal her power.
Because what would become of their friendship now that they’d crossed that invisible threshold?
“George used to say emotion is a spirit — let it in, and it will possess you. You will do unimaginable things to appease it.
Something in us, something that protects us, I think, tells us to run away. If we stayed, the past would haunt us. We would live there forever, locked in our despair.”
“He may have years left to live, but the darkness has taken him.”
For a moment, she saw George standing on an outcropping of rock, a little smile on his lips. He tilted his head toward her, and then he was gone.
