Laura Anderson Kurk Quotes

All of the emotions that hit people at times like these, all of them, were coursing through us both like a secret we couldn't tell. Because if we said everything we were thinking and feeling right then ... if we laid it all out for one another ... we might not like the way the words strung together. Or the way fear and hope and bitterness and love mashed up into one big mess in the pits of our stomachs.

Jo told me once that she was an old woman everywhere but in her studio. "There I'm only myself," she'd said. Standing in the middle of masterpieces that only Jo had ever seen and touched, I knew what she meant.

I'd known cruelty in a school - cruelty that would keep these amateurs up all night. But this kind of scene - crowds batting around a person because they thought he was weak - happened to be my personal trigger.

I'd never seen him bare-chested. For the first time, he seemed vulnerable to me. His smooth, tight skin wrapped around the long muscles he'd developed over a lifetime of hard work.
He found a shallow spot and sat, settling me onto his lap, holding my back to his chest. I couldn't stop shaking and it had nothing to do with the water or with being half dressed in a cave with a boy.
"Nothing else matters," Henry said in my ear. "I'm here. Start at the beginning.

He carried her over the Owl Creek mountain range without stopping," he said, quietly this time. "He carried her until he reached one of the hot springs around what became Chapin, and then he walked into the water with her and held her there for three days. He had about given up when she opened her eyes and whispered his name.

His room was dark until he switched on his desk lamp. I sat on the floor next to his bed and watched him counting clothes and considering shoes. He seemed so boyish right then - like he wished his mom would just come in and pack for him. I couldn't possibly love him any more than I did at that moment.

But with her eyes closed, she began to whisper. "If you have someone to love, then love. If you have someone to forgive, then forgive. You think, when you're seventeen, there's time enough for that, but there's not. There's no time at all."
I squeezed her hand, trying to think of how to respond. But she took the burden from me and kept whispering. "You want to know why God gave us people to love? Because that's the only way we can understand how he feels about us. Desperate and jealous.

But Quinn held the fuzzy handcuffs in his hands, looking them over closely, and he smiled. Oh, hey, did you want to keep these for when your invisible boyfriend returns from his fake vacation?

He'd had to fold his long legs into his desk. His boots had seen better days, and his jeans unraveled in a curiously irresistible way at the bottom. He didn't look like anyone I'd ever seen before. He reminded me of an actor in an old Western - Rock Hudson in Giant - all dark intensity.

I recognized Meg's swirly handwriting and crooked my index finger into the side of the envelope to rip it open. There was no letter. Just a picture.
A picture of Meg holding a picture of me.
The word HOME echoed through my body like a rifle shot.

I tell her all the time,'whiskey is risky and it makes girls frisky.

He leaned toward me and said his name like he was sharing a secret and it made me think he probably kept a lot of secrets. His smile was sweet and his teeth the tiniest bit crooked.

I smiled at him. Not even Wyatt would have known how to be this honorable when talking about a girl that had hurt him.

We bumped into other silent lines of kids going in the same direction. We looked like we were much younger and our lines were headed to the cafeteria or recess or the carpool line. Or it could've been a fire drill. Except for the stone-faced police officers weaving between us with rifles.

He ran his hand from my wrist up to the crook of my elbow and then to my shoulder. "When I was a little kid, my dad would come to my room at night to say a prayer with me. He used to say, 'Lord, We know there's a little girl out there who's meant for Henry. Please protect her and raise her up right.'" His voice changed to something slower and more country when he mimicked his dad. He smiled at the memory, and then he put his mouth near my ear and whispered. "You were that little girl.

I meant that the hatred of that July day in Nashville was alive and well on that horrible day in Pittsburgh. People hate others so they strike like snakes. It's all connected - we're all connected, bumping around into each other, some of us good, some bad, most a mixture. Every thought acted upon has consequences. Every one.

I could've gone on and on but the truth was all that mattered.
My brother died because someone was jealous.

1. All glass will break.
2. I am made of glass.
3. Therefore, I will break.

Every moment of our lives we make choices. Most we don't even know we're making, they're so dull or routine or automatic. Some are beyond explanation - like my mom choosing Wyatt's memory over Dad and me.

It was the first time I discovered that some girls actually sneak out of the house during slumber parties and meet up with boys. I would've never known if I hadn't gone to the bathroom at midnight and caught Macy and Adrienne climbing through the bathroom window. They had on eyeliner, perfume, and cut-off shorts. Their only goodbye a glare that promised retribution if I didn't keep my mouth shut.

You're kidding, right? The whole town will know where we are just by the idle on that thing."
He feigned a look of shock. "That thing is a 1966 GTO. It has a name, okay? It's Mack - as in 'to mack on women.' I rebuilt it last year, and I was told the engine makes girls hot."
"Someone actually used those words? Is it true?"
"TBD," he said.
"You're goofy. Let's ride in my Jeep. Its name is Jeep."
Quinn chuckled. "Kavanagh has a smart mouth.

Meg," he whispered. "It wouldn't be real love if there weren't the possibility for another response to him. If we couldn't choose not to love him, then our love would be empty. That's why there's evil in this world, because there's free choice in this world. He allows the one to prove the other.

Here was what I wanted to happen when I walked through the door after my first real date and my first ever kiss. I wanted my mom to say, "Dear God, Meg, you're glowing. Sit and tell me about this boy. He let you borrow his jacket? That's so adorable." Instead, I came off the high of that day by writing a letter to my dead brother and doing yoga between my twin beds, trying to forget my absent mother.

Next to the first Henry and Meg, Henry had written, "Promise?"
Well, that genie's out of the bottle and there's no stuffing her back in.

She didn't see me because of the reflection on the store windows, and she wouldn't know me in this car anyway. In fact, she probably wouldn't know me with shaggy hair and the beginnings of a beard. So I sat for a minute, watching her dusting bookshelves, either talking to herself or singing. Her feather duster had become a prop in whatever scene she had going.
She looked heart-stoppingly, breathtakingly beautiful, my Meg.

Let's go to town," Jo said. "Take me to eat dinner at the hotel."
I sucked in a breath and stared at her for a minute. Here she sat, her hair still wet although neatly braided, wearing an old Kiss sweatshirt, the one with the red mouth and tongue, red sweatpants, and ridiculous red pumps with black scuffs on the toes and heels.
And she wanted me to take her to the Hotel Wyoming, where the rich tourists hung out. I smiled. Because it was possibly the greatest thing I'd ever heard.
"Yeah, let's go to the hotel. Grab your purse and I'll find your coat.

It was an oddly satisfying idea to feel bereft as I left my mother this time. We only feel bereft when we're deprived of something meaningful.

My mom was sitting at the kitchen table. She'd set her coffee down, making a noise that made me look her way. I'd begun to notice her less and less often, like her colors were fading and blending in with walls. She was shrinking. Or maybe her sphere of influence in the family was shrinking. My dad glanced at her, too, and then wrote something on a napkin.
He slid it across the counter to me - Don't worry. Come home in one piece. Have fun and act like a sixteen-year-old for a change.

Most kids grow sullen and angry when they're working through issues, but Thanet mustered up another kind of bull-headed strength. The kind that sees beyond circumstances to what really matters. How could anyone hurt a soul that lovely?

Sometimes, in the stillness of my room, my mom's voice came to me, repeating things she'd said for months. Like, "My skin is melting off my face, isn't it?" And, "My whole body feels dead from the crap they're pouring into me. Do I look green to you?" And, "When I'm naked, I can see my heart beating.

I've known her long enough to know that this was purely intentional." He peered sideways at me, judging my reaction. "I like her just fine, but you should watch yourself around her. Tennyson is given to obsession, and her obsessions tend to run toward trouble. It's kind of a Wyoming thing to push the whole 'Wild West' routine to its limits.

In my mind, I saw a string stretching from Henry's heart at Quiet Waters to my heart. It was taut and it vibrated with Henry's worries and fears and I felt them all.
Deeply. I felt them all.

I pretended to be a Cheyenne guide. I pretended to be a prairie woman. I pretended Henry was my old-timey husband taking me to our new homestead. I leaned down and patted Trouble's neck. "Good boy," I said. "Trusty steed.

Uncommon anxiety came to us in common hours when other people were doing mundane things like taking out the trash or checking their phones. But there was nothing to be done for this. We couldn't change who we were or what had happened.

I found I could only glance at him for tiny moments and then I had to look away. He was perfect enough to hurt my feelings for a long time, and I wanted to let him.

Everybody likes to be known. Heck, its why people roll their car window down when their favorite song comes on. They're telling everybody, 'Hey, hear this? This is me.

The ice cold fear I'd felt, not knowing if Wyatt was alive, pressed into the wall with other girls and surrounded by guys who were unspeakably brave, hit my body again in a wave. This was trauma - the gift that keeps on giving.