Whitney Stapler

“I had a teacher who told me fiction is the future. Nonfiction is the past. One can be shaped and created. One cannot,” she said.”
― Amy Harmon, What the Wind Knows

“I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but not know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Grant me one more day of love, God, and one more, and another. One more blue afternoon with my children’s voices filling the sky—this, my only music. One more sight of their breath rising in plumes against the cold, so I may know they’re still breathing. Give me time enough to fix these memories in my heart. Let me write this love upon my soul.”
― Olivia Hawker, The Ragged Edge of Night

“I see the past as it actually was," Maeve said. She was looking at the trees.

"But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we're not seeing it as the people we were, we're seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House