Nicole

“In our stifling daily lives, we’re all so occupied with ourselves that we stop thinking about others. When a person loses their own heart, they can’t feel another’s pain. They lie, hurt others, use weaker people as stepping stones to get ahead – they stop feeling anything. The world has become full of those kinds of people.”
― Sōsuke Natsukawa, The Cat Who Saved Books

“HOW DO WE TUMBLE down a hill? A foot placed incautiously on an unsteady rock or loosened turf, an ankle twisted or a knee buckled, and of a sudden we are gone, our body lost to our own control until we find ourselves sprawled in indignity at the bottom. So it seems apt indeed to speak of the Fall. For sin, too, must always start with but a single misstep, and suddenly we are hurtling toward some uncertain stopping point. All that is sure in the descent is that we will arrive sullied and bruised and unable to regain our former place without hard effort.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders

“God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother's heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how He can test us so.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders

“My Tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint. Because they have been such a little time with us, they seem to hold to life but weakly. I used to wonder if it was so because the memory of Heaven still lived within them, so that in leaving here they do not fear death as we do, who no longer know with certainty where it is our spirits go. This, I thought, must be the kindness that God does for them and for us, since He gives so many infants such a little while to bide with us.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague