Ardette

“Couples sat on benches and the girls walked across a bridge over a wide, shallow river. The bridge was covered in padlocks. Names were written on the locks. Hearts and arrows and the word “Love” in English. At the other end of the bridge a worker in a green zip-up jumpsuit cut locks, one by one. He knelt, brought the bolt cutter into place and squeezed. The locks that did not fall into the river were kicked in by the worker, each one sounding a different note as it fell into the water.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“The smells of smoke and vinegar made him hungry; all he’d had for lunch was a peanut-butter-and-raisin sandwich.”
― Anne Tyler, Redhead by the Side of the Road

“There she is, that girl, on a planet of grass. Her wants are simple: to tilt her face to the sun and feel its warmth. To clutch the earth beneath her fingers. To escape from and return to the house she was born in. To see her life from a distance, as clear as a photograph, as mysterious as a fairy tale. This is a girl who has lived through broken dreams and promises. Still lives. Will always live on that hillside, at the center of a world that unfolds all the way to the edges of the canvas. Her people are witches and persecutors, adventurers and homebodies, dreamers and pragmatists. Her world is both circumscribed and boundless, a place where the stranger at the door may hold a key to the rest of her life. What she wants most—what she truly yearns for—is what any of us want: to be seen. And look. She is.”
― Christina Baker Kline, A Piece of the World

“As you made your way through life, there were people who stuck, the ones who stayed around forever and whom you came to need as much as you needed water or air. Others were meant to keep you company for a time. In the moment, you rarely knew which would be which.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Friends and Strangers