“I don't remember what they said, only the fury of their words, how the air turned raw and full of welts. Later it would remind me of birds trapped inside a closed room, flinging themselves against the windows and the walls, against each other.”

“We are surrounded on all sides by God but often we are no more conscious of him than we are of air pressing against us. We don't turn our attention to Him. (Evelyn Underhill)”

“I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?”

“The mermaids came to me finally, in the pink hours of my life. They are my consolation. For them I dove with arms outstretched, my life streaming out behind me, a leap against all proprieties and expectations, but a leap that was somehow saving and necessary. How can I ever explain or account for that? I dove, and a pair of invisible arms simply appeared, unstinting arms, like the musculature of grace suddenly revealing itself. They caught me after I hit the water, bearing me not to the surface but to the bottom, and only then pulling me up.”

“How one minute she was talking to you and the next she had slipped into a private world where she turned her thoughts over and over, digesting stuff most people would choke on. I wanted to say, Teach me how to do that. Teach me how to take all this in.”

“Loss takes up inside of everything sooner or later and eats right through it.”

“You put his brain in a bird, the bird would fly backwards" -Secret Life of the Bees”