Emmy B

“There are repercussions for living the life she’s chosen. I wonder if the loss is worth it, and if she believes it’s worth it. I wonder what she feels after I leave to go back to Dilip and she looks around her house. Maybe this isn’t her choice at all, but another path she has mapped over and over, one she cannot unlearn. I want to ask her if, in all the years she has run away, any part of her screams come after me? Does she want to be caught, brought back and convinced that she is important, that she is necessary?”
― Avni Doshi, Burnt Sugar

“What are secrets but things we want to forget? Why then would we keep acquaintance of others who remember them?”
― Cherie Jones, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

“I tell her I am not sure what to do, that maybe I’ve lost my imagination.
She says she never thought my work required much imagination, that it was copying an image over and over again.
I explain that I mean another kind of imagination, the kind that invents a world where my work matters. But the days seem endless and bright, so time doesn't seem to move.”
― Avni Doshi, Burnt Sugar

“I felt as though I had opened the cover of a beautiful, glossy book and become lost in the magic of its story, only to be forced too soon to put the book aside. You see? Already I had fallen under the spell of the Hartford children.”
― Kate Morton, The House at Riverton