Christina Baker Kline

This is like telling a person who has leapt off a cliff to be careful. I am already in midair.

It's as if she assumes everything will go right, and when it doesn't - which, of course, is pretty often - she is surprised and affronted.

When something terrible happens, a lifetime of small events and unremarkable decisions, of unresolved anger, and unexplored fears begins to play itself out in ways you least expect. You've been going along from one day to the next, not realizing that all those disparate words and gestures were adding up to something, a conclusion, you didn't anticipate. And later, when you begin to retrace your steps you see that you will need to reach back further than you could have imagined, beyond words and thoughts and even dreams, perhaps to make sense of what happened.

I'll play your fucking game. But I don't have to play by your rules.

Molly is the opposite. So many things have gone wrong for her in her seventeen years that she__ come to expect it. When something does go right, she hardly knows what to think.

If you really want to know me, I said, we'll have to start with the witches.

I want each day to last forever . . . It's a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction, a bittersweet nostalgia for a moment not yet past. Even in the midst of a pleasurable outing I'm aware of how ephemeral it is.

It's a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction, a bittersweet nostalgia for a moment not yet past.

I've come to think that's what heaven is - a place in the memory of others where our best selves live on." ,

I have come to think that's where Heaven is, a place in the memories of other where our best selves live

How did I go from being the maiden in a fairy tale to a wretched old maids so quickly? It happened almost without my realizing it...

I want to say, Christina, that you are ... unusual. And somehow..." her voice trails off. "Your mind-- your curiosity-- will be your comfort.

He reaches over and touches my necklace. "You still have it. That gives me faith." "Faith in what?""God, I suppose. No, I don't know. Survival.

Molly learned long ago that a lot of the heartbreak and betrayal that other people fear their entire lives, she has already faced. Father dead. Mother off the deep end. Shuttled around and rejected time and time again. And still she breathes and sleeps and grows taller. She wakes up every morning and puts on clothes. So when she says it's okay, what she means is that she knows she can survive just about anything.

This life of ours can feel an awful lot like waiting.

It is marvelous to be young on a big city street.

You can live for a long time inside the shell you were born in. But one day it'll become too small.""Then what?" I ask."Well, then you'll have to find a larger shell to live in."I consider this for a moment. "What if it's too small but you still want to live there?"She sighs. "Gracious, child, what a question. I suppose you'll either have to be brave and find a new home or you'll have to live inside a broken shell.

Do our natures dictate the choices we make, I wonder, or do we choose to live a certain way because of circumstances beyond our control?