Bea Goode-Parson

“Astonishingly, at some point, a sputtering torch was thrust into her hands. [...] The torch spit sparks and sent chunks of flaming tar spinning into the air behind her as she bolted across the cosmos—the only body in the heavens who was not held to a strict elliptical path.
Nobody stopped her.
She was a comet.
She did not know that she was not flying.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“She had never before possessed the courage for such remonstrance, but love had emboldened her, and her mind felt like an immaculate engine.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“What proportion of the peasantry was well off and what poor is judged by what they bequeathed, and since the poorest had nothing to leave, they remain mute. For no other class is that famous goal of the historian, wie es wirklich war (how it really was), so elusive.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Happily, Alma came to consider her library work as a kind of indoor gardening, with all the attendant satisfactions of muscular labor and beautiful unfoldings.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things