Emiellou

“Quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times, a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own.”
― Margaret Wise Brown

“She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.

My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father. And to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“When you feel someone else's pain and joy as powerfully as if it were your own, then you know you really loved them.”
― Ann Brashares, Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

“Every life needs a little space. It leaves room for good things to enter it.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, The Peach Keeper