Cynthia Voigt

“Hiding under the bed doesn't make the worry stop.”

“The people they had been last summer, the person she had been--Dicey guessed she'd never be afraid again, not the way she had been all summer. She had taken care of them all, sometimes well, sometimes badly. And they had covered the distances. For most of the summer, they had been unattached. Nobody knew who they were or what they were doing. It didn't matter what they did, as long as they all stayed together. Dicey remembered that feeling, of having things pretty much her own way. And she remembered the feelings of danger. It was a little bit like being a wild animal, she thought to herself. Dicey missed that wildness. She knew she would never have it again. And she missed the sense of Dicey Tillerman against the whole world and doing all right.”

“Mina thought to herself, watching, her momma was the kind of woman she wanted to be, wherever else she got to in her life.”

“Even after everyone had gone home, the house was filled with the good time they’d had, as if it could linger in the air like the voices and music lingered in memory. Mina wrapped the memory up and put it in her heart; there was a quiet gladness, deep like a tree and tall in her”

“Mina wanted some of the kind of love Momma gave to her children, wheere love was the first and deepest thing, and the questions came later and the answers wouldn't matter much measured up against the love.”

“It's never been today before.”

“I got to thinking—when it was too late—you have to reach out to people. To your family, too. You can't just let them sit there, you should put your hand out. If they slap it back, well you reach out again if you care enough. If you don't care enough, you forget about them, if you can.”

“Is there such a thing?' Birle asked.He looked thoughtfully at her, but not as if he saw her. 'Men have dreamed of it, although none has ever held it in his hand, not to my knowledge. I cannot say that there is such a thing, no. But equally I cannot say there is not. Why should a man be able to dream of it if it cannot be? If it is so impossible, then what put's it into a man's mind? Greed puts many things into men's mind, and fear does too. But men dream of other things, as well-- of justice, of the lost golden age, of an order to their world... of medicine to cure all sickness...”

“...When this map was made, there was only empty forest in the south," Gran told Birle."Not empty," Granda corrected her. "The forest is never empty.”

“People had no more choice than animals about the burdens they carried.”

“Why doesn't momma come back?”

“You must not let yourself become too respectable. Keep yourself a little wild. What is life for, if not for the living of it?”

“ I felt that the world itself had changed and that it would never be steady under my feet again. I felt I understood nothing of people and had no way to learn. I felt fear. Until you have felt fear, you cannot imagine it. Once you have really felt it, you know that all your earlier nervousness was but a pale shadow.”

“Men, and women too, are unpredictable creatures. You have seen little of this. I wonder now if your innocence is enough protection for you.”

“When a daring idea first crosses one's mind, if it is to be realized in the future it is often appealing. Then, as the time for its execution comes nearer, one begins to dread that which had once been anticipated. ”

“People can be unimaginably foolish...and they can be unimaginably grand, at times.”

“But I'll tell you something else, too. Something I've learned, the hard way. I guess"—Gram laughed a little—"I'm the kind of person who has to learn things the hard way. You've got to hold on. Hold on to people. They can get away from you. It's not always going to be fun, but if you don't—hold on—then you lose them.”

“...a really good friend, the kind of friend who - when they were together both of them were more able to be who they really were.”

“She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls’ hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.”

“She couldn’t get any farther away inside from her skin. She couldn’t get away.”

“I have the feeling that I know who I am, only I'm not anymore.”

“Dicey looked out over the tall marsh grasses, blowing in the wind. If the wind blew, the grasses had to bend with it.”