Julie

“I remember the day I looked at William and truly thought he was the answer. That with him, my life could be beautiful. I had thought that beauty was in the flashy, pretty things you acquired to prove that you were happy. But a flash is just a flash. It blinds you and then it disappears.

Now I think real beauty might be in all the small and obvious places I had overlooked. Oh, a rock in Manhattan. Oh, an empty street in Manhattan. Oh, my sister and me watching a movie. Oh, the sky. Our lives could be beautiful in the quietest ways, and already were.”
― Swan Huntley, We Could Be Beautiful

“Who's the Devil?"
Frances crouches down as if she were talking to Trixie.
"That's something I'll never tell you, Lily, no matter how old you get to be, because the Devil is shy. It makes him angry when someone recognizes him, so once they do the Devil gets after them. And I don't want the Devil to get after you."
"Is the Devil after you?"
"Yes."
"Jesus can beat the Devil."
"If God wants."
"God is against the Devil."
"God made the Devil."
"Why?"
"For fun."
"No, to test us."
"If you know, why are you asking me?"
"Daddy says there's no such thing as the Devil, it's just an idea."
"The Devil lives with us."
"No he doesn't."
"You see the Devil every day. The Devil hugs you and eats right next to you."
"Daddy's not the Devil."
"I never said he was. ..." Frances has got a dry look, tinder in the eye; her voice is a stack of hay heating up at the center, her mouth a stitched line. "I'm the Devil."
This is the moment Lily stops being afraid of anything Frances could ever say or do again. Stops being afraid of anything at all. She reaches out and takes Frances's hand. The white hand that always smells of small wildflowers, lily of the valley. The hand that has always done up Lily's buttons and laces, and produced wondrous objects. She holds Frances's hand and tells her,
"It's okay, Frances.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“Her father’s marvelous gentleness was not because he lacked a keen enough perception of the faults and wretchedness of others; it came from his constant searching of his own heart before God, crushing it in repentance over his own failings. No,”
― Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter

“The night is bright with the moon. Look down over Water Street. On the lonely stretch between where the houses end and where the sea bites into the land, a tree casts a network of shadow that stirs and bloats in one spot, as though putting fourth dark fruit that droops, then drops from the bough. It's a figure come out from under the branches and onto the street. It stops, drifting in place like a plant on the ocean floor. Then it travels again all the way down the street to the graveyard. It passes among the headstones that have flourished with the town, but it does not linger at the freshest mound. It continues to the edge of the cliff. There, it lies down on its stomach and places its neck upon the lip of the precipice, as though the earth were a giant guillotine. It looks straight out to the sea that stretches four thousand miles due east, and sings.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald