Carol Bakker

“Because of my situation, it seemed my life would necessarily be a life of resistance, but I would be sustained in it by a soul filled with love and hope.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“He had the heartening bulk of the aging athlete defeated by pastry”
― Leif Enger, Virgil Wander

“I had spent enough time in France to know that the words 'chez moi' meant something a thousand times more profound than one's current home. 'Chez moi' was the place your parents came from, or maybe even the region of your parents' parents. The food you ate at Christmas, your favorite kind of cheese, your best childhood memories of summer vacation -- all of these derived from 'chez moi.' And even if you had never lived there, 'chez moi' was knitted into your identity; it colored the way you viewed the world and the way the world viewed you.”
― Ann Mah, The Lost Vintage

“The cycle of the seasons, to which poets have so often turned as a reminder that nothing in this world is stable, is in fact one of the great constants in life. In some ways, the thousand years or more that have elapsed since the poems in this book were written have changed our world beyond recognition - but every year, when the blossom springs and the leaves fall, we see what the Anglo-Saxon poets saw. The revolving cycle finds us each year at a different moment in the story of our own lives; the unfolding events of history change us, but the seasons do not change.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year