Joyce’s Reviews > The Butterfly Garden > Status Update

Desmond wasn't good, no matter how much he wanted to be, and better than his family just wasn't enough. Every day he helped keep us here, he hurt me.

Does that mean that you love me too?

My mother taught me to make sure the man always says it first.

Doing a good thing for another Butterfly was the same as doing it for him.

She looked like she could burst into music @ any point. Unless you looked @ her face, @ tears that tracked silently down her cheeks, @ absolutely vacant look in her eyes, and understood that whatever made her Tereza wasn't there anymore.

I'd been in Garden long enough that outside world had become somewhat surreal, like a half-believed legend.

There was a book for each of the girls from the apartment. It was subtler than Nazira's drawings or Bliss's figures, but the same impulse.

Evita had once painted me a lovelly chrysanthemum on a rock, but that showed her sunny personality, not mine. My keeping it just meant that she was important to me.

The gifts we give say as much about us as the gifts we get and keep.

If this is the twisted she's admitting to, how much worse is the twisted she's still hiding?

Gardener clung to his delusions. Desmond eventually confronted hard truths, or @ least beginnings of them. He didn't know what to do w/them, but he didn't try to make them less than they were.