Libby

“Every tree is held up by its own history, the very bones of its ancestors...Jake has gained a new awareness of how her own life is being held up by unseen layers, girded by lives that come before her own. And by a series of crimes and miracles, accidents and choices, sacrifices and mistakes, all of which have landed her in this particular body and delivered her to this day.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“Take heart, she seems to say. The world has been on the brink of ending before. The dust has always been waiting to swallow us. People have always struggled and suffered. Your poverty is not shameful. It is not a failure of your character. Life, by its very nature, is precarious. And your struggles are never for nothing.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“Maybe trees do have souls. Which makes wood a kind of flesh. And perhaps instruments of wooden construction sound so pleasing to our ears for this reason: the choral shimmer of a guitar; the heartbeat thump of drums; the mournful wail of violins--we love them because they sound like us.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“Time, Liam has learned, is not an arrow. Neither is it a road. It goes in no particular direction. It simply accumulates—in the body, in the world—like wood does. Layer upon layer. Light, then dark. Each one dependent upon the last. Each year impossible without the one preceding it. Each triumph and each disaster written forever in its structure. His own life, he can admit now, will never be clear, will never be unblemished, will never be reclaimed. Because it is impossible to ungrow what has already grown, to undo what is already done. Still, people trust the things he’s built, and there is something to that. It’s not enough, but it’s what he’ll take with him.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood