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181 " Something in the way he said this filled me with warmth and instant joy. It was as though I had been sipping hot cocoa and the liquid was sliding down my throat and into my tummy on the coldest winter day. The feeling was lovely and exhilarating, even though it was surely ninety degrees in the park. "
― Susan Meissner , As Bright as Heaven
182 " I’d been too afraid my tears would christen it with my sorrows. I wanted nothing about the fire to exist in my "
― Susan Meissner , A Fall of Marigolds
183 " But with Mama and Uncle Fred and Charlie, the world doesn't stop. It just keeps spinning, with all its troubles, yanking us into its wild revolutions. There is no stepping into mourning, all secluded with nothing but much-warranted sorrow for company. Instead it's as if the train we're all on switched tracks at full speed and now we are racing forward in a completely new direction with no time to think about the destination we'd been headed toward before and now will never see. "
― Susan Meissner
184 " her it is complicated fighting for freedom and justice, but necessary if they were to hold on to what made them human and not beasts. "
― Susan Meissner , A Bridge Across the Ocean
185 " And I wonder, not for the first time, if the right thing to do is always the best thing. "
186 " This flu is like a black shroud that has been flung across everything that breathes under the canopy of heaven, and if you could stand back far enough, you wouldn’t see all the people it touches, only the immense length and breadth of its expanse. "
187 " ...The primroses always come back. Even after a hard winter, they find a way to survive. They come back every spring. "
― Susan Meissner , The Shape of Mercy
188 " Don't talk to me about fate, I wanted to say to Dora. Fate is just another word for saying we're all powerless. Me. Mama. Papa. Maggie. All of us. Love something long enough and true enough and fate will tear it right out of your hands if it chooses, and there's nothing you can do about it. "
189 " To her, there was only one shade to every color. This was the difference between us. She was happy with the one shade. "
190 " It wants to send us end over end so that what was up will be down. "
191 " I had no idea the gap between earth and heaven is narrow, no wider than a jump over a brook. I’d always thought heaven was so far from the living, no one could measure its distance from earth. Even the wisest person ever born couldn’t look up at the night sky through the most powerful telescope and catch a glimpse of heaven, it was that far off. "
192 " There is only the stunningly fragile human body, a holy creation capable of loving with such astonishing strength but which is weak to the curses of a fallen world. We are like butterflies, delicate and wonderful, here on earth for only a brilliant moment and then away we fly. Death is appointed to merely close the door to our suffering and open wide the gate to Paradise. "
193 " Heaven is just on the other side of waking . . . I can feel the canopy lifting, and I am not afraid . . . Look! Can you see it? It’s so beautiful! Look! So beautiful! "
194 " ...Despair is love's fiercest enemy. "
195 " Ralph Waldo Emerson that “Life is a journey, not a destination. "
― Susan Meissner , Secrets of a Charmed Life
196 " They spoke in languages that bore no resemblance to anything familiar: long, ribboned sentences looped together with alphabetic sounds that had no rhyme or meter. "
197 " Everyone I knew - including myself - had to scramble to make sense of what the flu and the war had taken from us. Millions upon millions of people had died around the globe from the flu, far more than in the war itself. The simple reclaiming of delight and goodness and joy had been a staggering endeavor that took place inside our minds, in the tangles of neurons that have always distinguished us from brutes and beasts. Our injuries were hidden deep within our psyches. That was where we needed the balm that would heal us. "
198 " helped him. "
199 " Henrietta might have said. "
200 " It seemed there were a thousand words for dreams realized and only one common whimper for hopes interrupted. "