Kimi Cunningham Grant > Quotes

“The thing about grace is that you don’t deserve it. You can’t earn it. You can only accept it. Or not.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“Because if your own child, the person for whom you’ve sacrificed everything, for whom you’ve broken laws as well as your own personal sense of boundaries, has lost confidence in you, and in turn, in themselves and the world at large, then what’s the point of any of it?”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“Spin into regretting and wishing and remembering, and it's a vortex, that type of thinking. It'll suck you right down and you have to kick and claw your way back. Better to stay in the present.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“It had been there, hadn't it? Something blooming between the two of us. A closeness. A possibility. And what had I done? Pulled away.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“That’s the nice thing about books. You can experience all different people and all sorts of places through them. All in the safety and comfort of your own home.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“The past was never dead; it was never past. But it didn’t have to own you, either. It didn’t have to be all you were.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, Fallen Mountains

“becoming a parent—it makes something inside of you bloom and deepen. You love as you haven’t loved before.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“The thing about grace is that you don't deserve it. You can't earn it. You can only accept it. Or not.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“The thing is, me and Judge had never gotten along, and here's why. He always saw things in black-and-white, which is maybe what judges are supposed to do. Me, I saw things how they really are: not black-and-white but a hundred shades inbetween.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“It is no respecter of persons, war. Even if it doesn’t damage your body, it damages your soul.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“Consider how much has happened. How a life can veer and stretch and retract and shatter. How it feels in this moment, as though things could crumble yet again with just the slightest alteration. Tenuous, this life. Nothing sure at all.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“That’s what friends do. We look out for each other, no matter what. We keep each other safe.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, The Nature of Disappearing

“It’ll get better, Finch. Right now the sadness is all there is. Maybe it feels like there’s something so heavy pulling at you that you’ll sink right down into the earth and never feel light again. But you will, in time. I promise.” She wipes her eyes and then asks, her voice shaking, “How long? How long does it take?” Scotland shakes his head. “I can’t say, Finch. Wish I could. It sort of differs from person to person. But time will tell. Most likely, you’ll just realize one day that you don’t feel as sad as you did the day before. And the day after that, you’ll be a little better, and so on. I’m guessing it’ll never fully go away, but it gets better.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“Most likely, you’ll just realize one day that you don’t feel as sad as you did the day before. And the day after that, you’ll be a little better, and so on. I’m guessing it’ll never fully go away, but it gets better.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“Let it suffice for me to say this: sometimes bad things happen and you’re unprepared and you make choices that seem good to you at the time, and then you look back and wish there were things you could undo, but you can’t, and that’s that.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“There are things that cannot be changed, and you don’t try to change them.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, Silver Like Dust: One Family's Story of America's Japanese Internment

“I’ve always believed that if something was meant to happen, you’d have a second chance at it. But never have I been so bold as to believe in a third or even a fourth chance. Almost like the world was trying to hand you something good after all it had dealt you your whole life was heartache, like it had changed its position on who you were and what you could have. Call it what you will: karma or good luck or maybe something more. Grace.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“Here we go again: People spilling their secrets to me. My confessional curse.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“THE THING IS to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you down like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, HOW CAN A BODY WITHSTAND THIS? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again. —Ellen Bass”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, The Nature of Disappearing

“Like a bird that wanders from its nest Is a man who wanders from his place. —PROVERBS 27:8”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“Maybe in the end, not letting yourself forgive someone — you were the one who paid the price for that, nobody else.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, Fallen Mountains

“Dollhouses. Libraries. School lunches on those melamine trays. Funnel cakes and Ferris wheels. Swimming pools: the smell of chlorine in your hair, those white chairs that hue with mildew. Saturday-morning cartoons. Riding a school bus. Telephones: the comfort of hearing someone’s voice who is far away. Airplanes, the miracle of flight. The ocean. Crushes. Sleepovers with friends. Back-to-school shopping. Playing dress-up. Getting a driver’s license. Bowling alleys. Ice cream, hand-dipped. Sharing secrets with a best friend. Proms. Field trips. Movie theaters. Walmart.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“Well. Bad things happen to people during war, even good people, as it did
with Jake. It is no respecter of persons, war. Even if it doesn’t damage your
body, it damages your soul”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant

“Be like the Japanese,” she wrote. “Learn to compartmentalize.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, Silver Like Dust: One Family's Story of America's Japanese Internment

“All of them skated through life making choices that could be swept away and tidied up with incomprehensible ease simply because of who they were.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, The Nature of Disappearing

“I want this. I do. I just can't rush into something again. I'm grieving and lonely and heartbroken right now and this would make things better temporarily, but in the end I would regret it. I would wonder whether it was real.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant

“[Faulkner]"The past is never dead. It isn't even past." In an attempt to remind his sons that every action had a consequence...and that terrible truth had plagued Red and his brother all through adolescence. Very street race through McKee's Rocks, every skipped class, every rock thrown into the glass of old factory buildings, every girl he ever touched--Red thought of Faulkner.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, Fallen Mountains

“It was a day of new beginnings. A day of hope.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, Silver Like Dust: One Family's Story of America's Japanese Internment

“I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them.’ Do you remember that one, Coop? Theodore Roethke. American poet, 1908 to 1963.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods