Julie

“It took me a long time to understand that what I had wanted was not a picture of something perfect. I already had that. What I had wanted was the feeling inside the pictures, the thing I had been trying to buy and drink and eat and not eat and fake my way to all my life. I wanted what everyone wanted. I wanted love.”
― Swan Huntley, We Could Be Beautiful

“The smile he gives me comes slowly but reaches into someplace deep, someplace that feel as if it's never been touched until now, like the cold bottom of the lake that the sun has never warmed before this moment. "You forget," he says, "you're my heart's true love.”
― Carol Goodman, The Lake of Dead Languages

“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

“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