Ali

“I hoped her life would turn topsy-turvy enough to get her attention. Topsy-turvy is often a symptom for the presence of God—the last become first, the hungry are fed, the obnoxious are welcomed.”
― Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

“The Thames that goes north, south, east, and west, to finally go east, that seeps to one side and the other as it moves forward, that goes slow as it goes fast, that evaporates into the sky whilst meandering to the sea, is more about motion than about beginnings. If it has a beginning, it is located in a dark inaccessible place. Better study where it goes than where it comes from.”
― Diane Setterfield, Once Upon a River

“For the first time in a lifetime by the river he noticed—really noticed—that under a moonless sky the river makes its own mercurial light. Light that is also darkness, darkness that is also light.”
― Diane Setterfield, Once Upon a River

“And there is more: what we see on a map is only the half of it. A river no more begins at its source than a story begins with the first page. Take Trewsbury Mead, for instance. That photograph, do you remember? The one they were so quick to dismiss, because it wasn’t picturesque? An ordinary ash in an ordinary field, they said, and so it appears, but look more closely. See this indentation in the ground, at the foot of the tree? See how it is the beginning of a furrow, shallow, narrow, and unremarkable, that runs away from the tree and out of the picture altogether? See here, in the dip, where something catches the light and shows as a few ragged patches of silver in the grey shades of muddy soil? Those bright marks are water, seeing sunlight for the first time in what might be a very long time. It comes from underground, where, in all the”
― Diane Setterfield, Once Upon a River