Ardette

“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

“Every so often, life offers you a reset button. When it does, you need to press it as hard as you can. Jane said that to me once. Back in our reading-on-her-bed days, when I was too young to understand what she meant. Now I do.”
― Riley Sager, Lock Every Door

“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

“Like everyone else, she is stumbling forward, one foot in front of the other, not always in the right direction but staggering on just the same.”
― Suzanne Redfearn, In an Instant