Believing Quotes

“I knocked quickly, brushing my disordered hair back from my eyes. The door swung open and I was in the shadowy, warm kitchen, almost in Mrs. Klevity’s arms. “Oh!” I backed up, laughing breathlessly. “The wind blew—” “I was afraid you weren’t coming.” She turned away to the stove. “I fixed some hot cocoa.” I sat cuddling the warm cup in my hands, savoring the chocolate sip by sip. She had made it with milk instead of water, and it tasted rich and wonderful. But Mrs. Klevity was sharing my thoughts with the cocoa. In that brief moment when I had been so close to her, I had looked deep into her dim eyes and was feeling a vast astonishment. The dimness was only on top. Underneath—underneath— I took another sip of cocoa. Her eyes—almost I could have walked into them, it seemed like. Slip past the gray film, run down the shiny bright corridor, into the live young sparkle at the far end. I looked deep into my cup of cocoa. Were all grownups like that? If you could get behind their eyes, were they different too? Behind Mom’s eyes, was there a corridor leading back to youth and sparkle?”
― Zenna Henderson, Believing: The Other Stories of Zenna Henderson

“For another thing, there’s so much they don’t know. And not knowing things makes them know lots of other things grownups can’t know. That sounds confusing and it is. But look at it this way. Every time you teach a kid something, you teach him a hundred things that are impossible because that one thing is so. By the time we grow up, our world is so hedged around by impossibilities that it’s a wonder we ever try anything new.”
― Zenna Henderson, Believing: The Other Stories of Zenna Henderson

“Anna …” I don’t know whether she was even hearing my answers; her voice was almost a chant “… Anna, have you ever been in prison?” “No! Of course not!” I recoiled indignantly. “You have to be awfully bad to be in prison.” “Oh, no. Oh, no!” she sighed. “Not jail, Anna. Prison—prison. The weight of the flesh—bound about—” “Oh,” I said, smoothing my hands across my eyes. She was talking to a something deep in me that never got talked to, that hardly even had words. “Like when the wind blows the clouds across the moon and the grass whispers along the road and all the trees pull like balloons at their trunks and one star comes out and says ‘Come’ and the ground says ‘Stay’ and part of you tries to go and it hurts—” I could feel the slender roundness of my ribs under my pressing hands. “And it hurts—”
― Zenna Henderson, Believing: The Other Stories of Zenna Henderson

“She was talking to a something deep in me that never got talked to, that hardly even had words.”
― Zenna Henderson, Believing: The Other Stories of Zenna Henderson

“Finally I shrugged in the dark and wondered what I’d pick for funny when I grew up. All grownups had some kind of funny.”
― Zenna Henderson, Believing: The Other Stories of Zenna Henderson