Star Forbis

“our hearts burned within us, our souls stood on tiptoe, our eyes recognized something good and true, and our minds could believe, if not fully, then ever so slightly, that love and heaven and forgiveness are the most real things that we can know in this world?”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“And remember, heaven can draw a straight line with a crooked stick.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“The magic of story. The wonder of words. The fertility of imagination.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“There is an articulation of life one hears again and again. People will say, ‘oh, this is only a season.’ You know what I am referring to, don’t you? I mean how if someone is in difficulty they’ll say ‘it’s only a season.’ Or if someone is having a new baby and in the sleepless nights, an older woman will comfort with this idea that the expanse of time is a season—a winter, I suppose? (rather, a hurricane season!)—and the season will change eventually to something sunnier. I take issue with this. There are, by definition, four seasons that repeat in measured pattern year after year. As there is no such rhythm in the human life, I have to think that when it comes to seasons we all get one round. We are born and grow through childhood in spring. We live those glorious, lively, interesting years of our twenties, thirties, forties in summer. We settle into ourselves in autumn, that cool but not yet cold time, rich and aromatic. And in winter we age (brutally) and die. One turn of the seasons per person, unless it’s cut short, like it was for Gill, and like it was for Quintana Roo. I suppose, on this schedule, we’d say your John had made it to fall. My mother died in her summer.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent