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“Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“I was so absorbed by the task of planning for spring that I completely forgot how long the wait for true springtime would be. I was thinking about the scent of turned earth, the feel of damp soil. I was feeling grateful that nature always renews itself, given even half a chance. I was remembering my favorite part of planting: the moment when the seedling, fragile as any lace-winged insect or hollow-boned nestling, somehow shoves the clods of earth aside and makes its way upward and outward. Searching for the light.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I am learning that it is possible to want two contrary things at once. I want nothing to change. I want everything to change.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“In years to come, will they remember with nostalgia what must seem even now like a magnificent chorus of birdsong pouring down from the trees? Are we all, generation upon generation, destined to mourn what seems in this moment impossibly abundant but is already far on its way to being gone? The world will always be beautiful to those who look for beauty. Throats will always catch when the fleeing clouds part fleetingly and the golden moon flashes into existence and then winks out again. Tears will always spring up at the wood thrush singing through the echoing trees, at the wild geese crying as they fly. A soul touched by the scent of turned soil or sun-warmed grass, a spirit moved by crickets singing in the grass, will spend a lifetime surrounded by wonder even as songbirds drop one by one from the poisoned sky and crickets fall silent in the poisoned grass. Apocalyptic stories always get the apocalypse wrong. The tragedy is not the failed world's barren ugliness. The tragedy is its clinging beauty even as it fails. Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty besotted will find a reason to love the world.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Others were less perceptive. I started going out more and seeing friends from university. People told me they’d heard about Harry and how sorry they were. People told me he had a new girlfriend. People told me how great I looked, over and over and over again. Every compliment fed me like lunch.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“We know the names of all our grandparents and our childhood toys and we know the exact words that, when put in a certain order, will make each other laugh or cry or shout. There isn’t a pebble on the beach of my history that she has left unturned. She knows where to find everything in me and I know where all her stuff is too. She is, in short, my best friend.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“I thought that, to be a writer, I had to be a collector of experiences. And I thought every experience worth having, every person worth meeting, only existed after dark. I always remembered something Hicks told me as we lay in bed under the fairy lights of her student room twinkling around her window. “One day we will sit in a nursing home, Dolly, bored out of our minds and staring at the quilt on our laps,” she said. “And all we will have to make us smile are these memories.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“These gaps in each other’s lives slowly but surely form a gap in the middle of your friendship. The love is still there, but the familiarity is not. Before you know it, you’re not living life together anymore. You’re living life separately with respective boyfriends then meeting up for dinner every six weekends to tell each other what living is like. I now understand why our mums cleaned the house before their best friend came round and asked them “What’s the news, then?” in a jolly, stilted way. I get how that happens. So don’t tell me when you move in with your boyfriend that nothing will change. There will be no road trip. The cycle works when it comes to holidays as well—I’ll get my buddy back for every sixth summer, unless she has a baby in which case I’ll get my road trip in eighteen years’ time. It never stops happening. Everything will change.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“On the flight home, I daydreamed of Tottenham Court Road and ordering shit off Amazon. I thought of Farly’s laugh and the sound of my flatmates getting ready for work in the morning and the smell of my mum’s perfume in her hair when I hug her. I thought of the blissful mundanity of life; of what a privilege it was to live it.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“After I came home, things got easier for a while. The heavy coat of sadness I had been wearing for so long began to lift. I made a proper plan for what I wanted to do next. I fell back in love with my city, wildly. I read Bill Bryson books about England and ate Toffee Crisps. I remembered how lucky I was to live in a place I had grown up in, a place filled with my friends.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“We walked home in the beautiful light and I felt grateful for Florence’s life and everything she had taught me. I was grateful for the sun on Kew Bridge as I placed each foot in front of the other. I was grateful for understanding in that moment that life can really be as simple as just breathing in and out. And I was thankful to know what it was to love the person walking next to me as much as I did. So deeply, so furiously. So impossibly.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“I thought about an article I had read about premature death after Florence died; the one in which an advice columnist advised a grieving father not to think of the life his teenage son would have led had he not been killed in a car crash. This fantasy, she said, was an exercise of torture rather than of comfort. “You know, that life isn’t happening elsewhere,” I said. “It doesn’t exist in another realm. Your relationship with that man was seven years long. That was it, that’s what it was.” “I know.” “Your life is here, now. You’re not about to live a tracing-paper copy of it.” “Yeah, I suppose it’s better not to dwell on what could have been.” “Don’t think of it as Sliding Doors.” “I love that film.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“The sea swallowed the sun and the sky slowly turned to dusky blue and then night as if operated by a dimmer. It never was as bad as that day again.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“On the afternoon of her birthday, she went to another tattoo parlor to amend her error from a decade ago. She had the stars filled in with dark ink; she painted it black. She put an “F” next to one of them for Florence and a “D” for me. A reminder that no matter what we lose, no matter how uncertain and unpredictable life gets, some people really do walk next to you forever.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“One night, having spent a few days in peaceful solitude with my thoughts, I walked under the stars and along the cobbled streets and an idea crept all over me like arresting, vibrant blooms of wisteria. I don’t need a dazzlingly charismatic musician to write a line about me in a song. I don’t need a guru to tell me things about myself I think I don’t know. I don’t need to cut all my hair off because a boy told me it would suit me. I don’t need to change my shape to make myself worthy of someone’s love. I don’t need any words or looks or comments from a man to believe I’m visible; to believe I’m here. I don’t need to run away from discomfort and into a male eyeline. That’s not where I come alive. Because I am enough. My heart is enough. The stories and the sentences twisting around my mind are enough. I am fizzing and frothing and buzzing and exploding. I’m bubbling over and burning up. My early-morning walks and my late-night baths are enough. My loud laugh at the pub is enough. My piercing whistle, my singing in the shower, my double-jointed toes are enough. I am a just-pulled pint with a good, frothy head on it. I am my own universe; a galaxy; a solar system. I am the warm-up act, the main event, and the backing singers. And if this is it, if this is all there is—just me and the trees and the sky and the seas—I know now that that’s enough. I am enough. I am enough. The words ricocheted through me, shaking every cell as they traveled. I felt them; I understood them; they fused into my bones. The thought galloped and jumped through my system like a racehorse. I called it out to the dark sky. I watched my proclamation bounce from star to star, swinging like Tarzan from carbon to carbon. I am whole and complete. I will never run out. And I am more than enough. (I think they call it “a breakthrough.”)”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“I woke up safe in my one-woman boat. I was gliding into a new horizon; floating in a sea of love. There it was. Who knew? It had been there all along.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“The way death and life mingle and tangle, like the passion vine that twines among the blackberry canes in my pollinator garden—it’s always been like that. Or maybe it’s only death itself that comes as a shock, a giant rent in the tightly woven shroud we wear without noticing for all our days, no matter how many or how few we are given.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“In times of fear and grief, it is tempting to assign human meaning to natural systems. How many people have told me that a loved one has returned to reassure them in the form of a mockingbird singing at midnight outside a silent house or a swallowtail butterfly lighting on a freshly carved tombstone? When the world has lost its still center, we grasp for any reminder that it is nevertheless spinning exactly as it must.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Sometimes, family isn’t just what you’re born into—it’s also what you build in the aftermath of loss.”
― Shari Franke, The House of My Mother: A Daughter's Quest for Freedom

“A daughter’s sin is a mother’s liability, just as a mother’s sin is a daughter’s burden.”
― Jane Yang, The Lotus Shoes