Caroline Bleeke

“We can never stop searching for Heaven, since there is always more of it than we can see. There, as in those tales that evolve endlessly into other tales, stories have no end. They are hardly ever the stories you know, the official ones, in which wishes are made formal, then legislated and enforced as matters of life or death. They are more often the stories we didn’t hear, or wouldn’t believe, told by the person we ignored, the house that was razed, the choir of dry bones. The scholars of Heaven read and study the vast collection of ashes, books from the torched libraries.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“And what does God ask of you?”
“To fly without wings. To do what seems impossible. To cling to our loves through the rapids of our hates. To know that God charges us with the task of making these miracles. They exist between person and person, as flame goes from candle to candle. To know that all we can know of right or wrong is through the way our acts are revealed in the lives of other people. There is no other way to see God. It is not given to us.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“They lay together like a word and a comma, asleep within an unfinished sentence.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“Is she a good baby? People would ask me. Well, no, I'd say.

That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it.”
― Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation