T. Greenwood Quotes

How sad was it that grief had a shelf life, he thought. It's only fresh and raw for so long before it begins to spoil. And soon enough, it would be replaced by a newer, brighter heartache - the old one discarded and eventually forgotten.

This is what I know: memory is the same as water. It permeates and saturates. Quenches and satiates. It can hold you up or pull you under; render you weightless or drown you. It is tangible, but elusive.

My mother, stuck in Two Rivers with a head full of unfulfilled dreams, escaped every chance she got via the Two Rivers Free Library - her library card both a passport and necessary currency for her travels.

We lived among people whose poverty could be seen in the length of their faces, in their tired speech and in the heaviness of their eyes.

How could it be, how was it possible, when she felt like she was so far away, that the sky was the same?

... I'm a half-empty kind of girl.

It didn't matter where they went, the stars followed. A map of the universe spread out before them.

Time does not heal wounds. It's a body's ritual that does. The instinctual cleansing with rain or other waters, the application of salves. Despite the sting. Even neglected, the body begins to take care. To repair itself. Blood clots, tissues regenerate, flesh scars. Soon, the thin white line is the only evidence of the pain. It is the body, not time. Time does nothing except create distance between the body and that which caused it harm.
Recollection of fear can be stronger than the original fear itself. Similarly, bliss is sometimes more vivid when recollected. How else do you explain longing? Longing for what has already passed. That's the real pain.
But you insisted, you pried with your fingers to see. You retuned to me after I turned away. You made me recollect for you, collect again and again for you, inturrupting the healing with your curiosity.
Now that I have given you the words, you may long for them. You may miss me. YOu may try to find the notes to the song again and again and won't be able to find them. Perhaps, the wounds I made will already have begun to scar. Maybe the body will have begun its ritual of forgetting.
I told you not to ask for haunted, not to ask me to recollect. Because recollection is like tearing at closed wounds. Like pealing back the careful tissue put there by the body to make it safe. And because remembered pain is always worse than the original pain, because this time it is expected. This time you already know how

Sometimes things need to get broken

This is one other thing I know: without autumn, there is no end. Without red and gold and orange there is no finality, no conclusion. Without the sudden shift in the air, without the scent of apples and the crisp chill of morning, summer could go on forever. Without fall, summer lingers. There is a marvelous limbo where I live now, without the changing of seasons. No blazing display to signify the end of everything good. Perhaps this is what drew me to California. A place where time is suspended.

Hope is really just desire disguised, just desperation, aching, dressed up like a prayer.

This is the thing about a lie: over time, it not only obscures the truth but consumes it. Those who pursue veracity (those dogooders, those seekers) see truth not as an abstract thing but something concrete. Strong, vivid, with an unassailable right to prevail. But those who fight for it, who fight in the name of it, do not understand that truth is anemic, weak. Especially in the hands of an accomplished liar. Especially over years. A lie, in collusion with time, can overpower the truth. A good lie has the power to subsume reality. A good lie can become the truth.

The Chinese philosopher Mencius believed that man is innately good. He argued that anyone who saw a child falling into a well would immediately feel shock and alarm, and that this impulse, this universal capacity for commiseration, was proof positive that man is inherently good.

I thought about things stolen from me. I thought about the thieves I had known.

He wreaked havoc, but his path of destruction was invisible. The girls and I were the casualties of an amnesiac.

But Ruby understands now, this inclination. This desire to slip away. To seclude herself. She understands how it feels to be an island, separate from everyone else, surrounded by nothing but water. Even when she is with people (at school, at Izzy's house, at the pool), she is aware of how alone she is. Nobody can reach her, not really. She and her mother are more similar than different, but she doesn't know how to tell her mom this. What words might explain she understands.

People say we are defined by the choices that we make;

It is too easy lately to drink too much. To love the warm way it numbs. And I feel Jake watching me; he's counting my drinks too.

We pretended she'd only gotten lost in the colors of fall.
Piper

And everything with you is always so, I don't know, fucking heavy.

The secret to happiness is counting your blessings while others are adding up their troubles.

Don't you hate waking up after the day's already started? Jake usually asks, like it's a race. As though by the time I roll out of bed I'm already lagging behind everyone else, as if I'll never be able to catch my stride.

But even then, even all those years when she was never physically by herself, she was beginning to feel the chasm growing between her and the rest of the world. It was like a small tear in the seam of a dress, a certain pulling away. A ripping. And once it started, there was no stopping it. Of course, she tried so hard to keep it together, to tether herself to this world. She filled her life with people. With friends and family. But even then she knew that mere presence of people in one's life cannot eliminate the terrifying sense of one's aloneness in the world. Being surrounded by people is not the same as connection. As friendship. As love. When Robert came along, she believed for a little while she had found the answer, the bridge that crossed the deep canyon. And children too became links between herself and normalcy. The accident didn't start it, it just proved the faultiness, the tenuousness of these connections.