How to Fly: In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons

by Barbara Kingsolver

Everything that can wreck a life has been done before, done to you, even. That’s all inside you now.

These you have to give up: Collected shells and pressed flowers. The eyes that knew your body when it was still perfect. Everything must go.

Love is no granite boulder, praised for its size. It’s the water that parts around it, moving mountains.

Running is lost before walking, laughter before smiling, hope before fear.

Here begins my life as no one’s bad daughter.

She knows the work of a life is the making of things a child will not believe we could have made. Because.

Always we walk each other home. And always we walk some of it alone.

The things a person will murder in order to name.