Polly Horvath

“I want someone who puts the whole ball of wax at risk. I want the kind of marriage where we would follow each other out into the stormy fatal sea or I'm not marrying at all.”

“You can't replace one dog with another any more than you can replace one person with another, but that's not to say you shouldn't get more dogs and people in your life.”

“Maybe we live in a universe where all you have control over is your own kindness.”

“All my life I had wanted to travel but what I discovered that year was that the things that you find out become the places that you go and sometimes you find them out by being jettisoned off alone and other times it is the people who choose to stand by your side who give you the clues. But the important things that happen to you will happen to you even in the smallest places...”

“There's something about sports. You can be setting fire to cats and burying them in your backyard, but as long as you're playing team sports, people think you're okay.”

“The richness of our lives depends on what we are willing to notice and what we are willing to believe.”

“Some people, well, most people just seem to show up on your life with no clear purpose. Have you noticed that? They're like dust mites. You know they're there, you just don't know what to do about them.”

“Sometimes it is good to have things happen to you outside of your control. There are parts of yourself you would never discover otherwise.”

“We read a lot of books. Children's books mostly, because they're always much more truthful than adult books. And much more entertaining," said Mrs. Bunny.”

“People can be hurt so badly that they choose to just stop in their tracks.”

“And, I often think, the truth isn't good or bad, it's just the truth.”

“She was alone in the stillness of the universe a little while before all the confusion began. It was if she could hear it ticking, check in on the life at the very center of it, its wellspring that everyone somehow knows, before it was covered by noise.”

“When you're a child you never figure a grownup is going to be jealous of you. It's the grownups who seem to have everything. Children give adults far too much credit.”

“The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.”

“Is this what it is to get older, to have adventures you can no longer tell your family because you are moving apart from them?...Or do you grow up and have adventures you tell no one? Are some adventures only yours alone?”

“We all belong here equally...Just by being born onto the earth we are accepted and the earth supports us. We don't have to be especially good. We don't have to accomplish anything. We don't even have to be healthy.”

“I think that it is death alone that makes things poignant.”

“No one really understands a family but the people in it and even they each understand it differently.”

“Yesterday I was so full of hope. My life seemed blessed, full of adventures and answered prayers, and now something very, very bad has happened and it will never be the same again. And it all happened because I was greedy. Because I couldn't have an ordinary life. Because I was so taken with the wonders of the world that I could not be content with anything less than the constant awareness of its miracles.”

“Suddenly I realize that everyone in the whole world is, at the end of a day, staring at a dusky horizon, owner of a day that no one else will ever know.”

“We can affect people around us so much with our moods. A depressed person can make a room gloomy and a sweet nature can cause the lion to lie down with the lamb.”

“It's better to be fooled a hundred times than never to look.”

“I am not in the body of life. I hover on the extremities. I float.”

“You know what Sunday is, it's a day with a lot of potential for naps.”

“The only really interesting thing about someone that makes you want to explore them further is their heart, and Miss Honeycut has a teeny tiny pea-sized one and it takes you nowhere you want to go.”