Renee Freeman

“It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read.”
― Lemony Snicket

“The touchstones that stand in our memory rarely match up to reality. They suffer from the distortion of time, with a tendency to become bigger and grander whenever we call them to mind.”
― Pamela Terry, The Sweet Taste of Muscadines

“Well, this is my final truth: if I had a granddaughter, I would want her to be exactly like you.”
― Marianne Cronin, The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot

“Florence’s mother liked to imagine a life of diamonds and gilt for her daughter. But this, this, was the life Florence wanted. A blue-and-white teacup stuffed with clementine peels. A tangle of white ranunculus in a ceramic pitcher on the windowsill. Amanda had once put a vase of those same flowers on her desk at work. The whole place looked like a painting by Vermeer. And it was cold. Chilly gusts rattled the windows in their frames. Someone had told Florence once that glass was actually a liquid that settled slowly, over eons; that was why in old houses the windows were always thicker at the bottom than at the top. Was that true? Florence didn’t care. In the same way she couldn’t understand why people were so determined to expose Maud Dixon’s identity, she couldn’t understand why they needed to pin things down, turn poetry into fact. Wasn’t poetry better? Why would you turn something beautiful into something quotidian?”
― Alexandra Andrews, Who Is Maud Dixon?