Jennifer

“Twenty-three One day you wake up and you’re twenty-three and you can’t remember what it feels like to be seventeen but you still cry to your mother after a bad day and you look a little older but you don’t really feel it. One day you’re twenty-three and your great-aunt is telling you how mature you look and how you grew a little taller but inside you still remember sitting under the oak tree reading with no meetings tomorrow and no rent to pay and the only thing you can think about is how at seventeen you thought at twenty-three you would know everything and now you can’t remember how you got from there to here. But seventeen-year-old you was wrong because you know only some things and not everything. You know that coffee tastes better in the mornings and your home isn’t your home anymore; it’s “Mum and Dad’s.” You know your car needs servicing every six months and groceries are harder to do after breakups. She liked cookie dough and walnuts and strawberry-flavored milk and now every time you go to the store you can’t buy spaghetti without remembering it was a Friday night and she kissed you for the first time and the heat from her skin could have set your entire place on fire. One day you’re twenty-three and you’re trying to explain to a seventeen-year-old all the mistakes you made so they won’t make them too, when all you really want is for someone to realize you still don’t have the first clue.”
― Courtney Peppernell, Pillow Thoughts

“Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is.
Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being in love, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.
Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground, and, when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.”
― Louis de Bernières, Corelli’s Mandolin

“You can't skip chapters, that's not how life works. You have to read every line, meet every character. You won't enjoy all of it. Hell, some chapters will make you cry for weeks. You will read things you don't want to read, you will have moments when you don't want the pages to end. But you have to keep going. Stories keep the world revolving. Live yours, don't miss out.”
― Courtney Peppernell, Healing the Heart

“Some things will never be fair for everyone. This is the saddest realization that the universe can teach. So if they are fair for you, remember to be grateful.”
― Courtney Peppernell, Pillow Thoughts