starrymess

“That the beginning and the end may have been chosen for us, the string already spun, but the middle had always been left undetermined, to be woven and shaped by us.”
― Nikki Erlick, The Measure

“Maybe the boxes are like that, too. Nobody can offer any foolproof explanation for them, so they just end up meaning whatever we want them to mean — whether that’s God or fate or magic. And no matter how long your string is, that, too, can mean whatever you want it to — a license to behave however you want, to stop dieting, to seek revenge, to quit your job, to take a risk, to travel the world.”
― Nikki Erlick, The Measure

“Once she was in the main room, surrounded by the tall wooden shelves and the familiar scent of thousands of pages, Amie felt herself relax. There were few places where she felt more contented than a book store.”
― Nikki Erlick, The Measure

“She didn’t want to talk about the ending. So she talked about the story itself. “It’s easy to look at our time together and think that we were so unlucky. But isn’t it better to spend ten years really loving someone, rather than forty years growing bored or weary or bitter? When we think about the greatest love stories ever written, we aren’t judging them by their length. Many of them were even briefer than my marriage with Maura. But our story—mine and Maura’s—it felt deep, and it felt whole, despite its length. It was an entire, wonderful tale in and of itself, and even though I’ve been given more chapters than Maura, her pages were the ones you couldn’t put down. The ones that I’ll keep rereading, over and over, for the rest of my life. Our decade together, our story, was a gift.”
― Nikki Erlick, The Measure