Lauren Wolk Quotes

Anyone who's ever gone from warm and bright to cold and dark knows how I felt.

At times, I was so confused that I felt like the stem of a pinwheel surrounded by whir and clatter, but through that whole unsettling time I knew that it simply would not do to hide in the barn with a book and an apple and let events plunge forward without me.

We girls in the 4-H club had made a flag to hang in the church, adding a blue star every time someone from the township went off to fight. When one of them died, we changed the blue star to a gold one. Just two, so far, but I had been to their funerals, and I knew there was no "just" about it.

school wouldn't help them fight the Germans.

And that's when I felt the first wave of sorrow that came from keeping a new secret.

I didn't tell him that I'd put his awful stories in boxes and stacked them on a shelf at the back of my mind. I could hear a quieter version of them still, from their dark place, through all the other business that occupied my brain, but I wouldn't unlid those boxes until I was ready to hear [his] stories again as they wanted to be heard.

But think about how it feels when your hands are so cold they go numb. How it's only when they start to thaw out that you realize how much they hurt.

The things we need to learn to do, we learn to do by doing.

The year I turned twelve, I learned that what I said and what I did mattered. So much, sometimes, that I wasn't sure I wanted such a burden. But I took it anyway, and I carried it as best I could.

I think I've been wrong about some things," I said slowly. . . .

"Like what?"

"Like people," I said.

He huffed. "Easiest mistake in the world," he said.

Don't you understand, Crow? You're the one worth finding" -Osh

At which I felt hot and cold at the same time. Too big for my skin. Too small." -Crow

...I'd rather know too much than too little" -Annabelle

And I decided that there might be things I would never understand, no matter how hard I tried. Though try I would.

And that there would be people who would never hear my one small voice, no matter what I had to say.

But then a better thought occurred, and this was the one I carried away with me that day: If my life was to be just a single note in an endless symphony, how could I not sound it out for as long and as loudly as I could? (p228)

But the wind always swept my words away like cloud shadows, as if it mattered more that I said them, than who heard them.

We spent some time like that, me asking small questions, Toby giving me longer and longer answers, until we were simply talking, Toby asking me questions, too.

Wouldn't that be a good thing? Not to feel pain?" -Crow

"There's more than one kind of pain...and if you don't feel it, you can get hurt" -Miss Maggie

"But it hurts when you do feel it, too" -Crow

"Yes, but feeling hurt and being hurt aren't always the same thing" -Miss Maggie

Nothing less important in the eyes of God, Annabelle, than pretty.

All around us, birds woke up the sky.

In fact, I was glad to know something not everyone did: that there are better bonds than blood" -Crow

Somewhere, excitement waited for me like an uncut cake.