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21 " But what was family? Surely more than genes, eye color, flesh. Family was story: truth and struggle and retribution. Family was time. "
― Anthony Doerr , About Grace
22 " What is death, after all, but a cessation of involvement with the world, a departure from those you love, and those who love you? "
23 " What is time? he wrote in his pad. Must time occur in sequence—beginning to middle to end—or is this only one way to perceive it? Maybe time can spill and freeze and retreat; maybe time is like water, endlessly cycling through its states. "
24 " To enter a world of shadows is to leave this world for another. "
25 " Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitrary. "
26 " There must be some definite cause why, whenever snow begins to fall, its initial formation invariably displays the shape of a six-cornered starlet. For if it happens by chance, why do they not fall just as well with five corners or with seven? . . . Who carved the nucleus, before it fell, into six horns of ice? —From “On the Six-Cornered Snowflake,” by Johannes Kepler, 1610 "
27 " Soon there was a horizon, ironed flat as if by the load of the sky, and a sailboat toiling across it. "
28 " All the things he did not see... (a black bear, two hawks, horsemen, a trio of summer cabins far below him...) "
29 " In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history. "
30 " Our shadows are our histories. We drag them everywhere. "
31 " You ever hope for something so much? So much you can't sleep, so much your skull hurts? But the thing is, you don't even know if the thing you're wishing for is possible? You don't even know if it could happen? And it's all out of your control? "
32 " Hope was a sunrise, a friend in the alley, a whisper in an empty corridor. "
33 " What use are memories when memories can do little more than fade? "
34 " He marveled at the indifference of the world, the way it kept on, despite everything. "
35 " But have heart. Hope is something that can be very dangerous but without it life would be horribly dry. Impossible, even. Take it from me. "
36 " Maybe he was dead and this island was purgatory from which he could only watch the souls of the more deserving go shuttling past to their various Edens. What is death, after all, but a cessation of involvement with the world, a departure from those you love, and those who love you? "
37 " This, perhaps, is how lives are measured, a series of abandonments that we hope beyond reason will eventually be reconciled. "
38 " Am I following a path already laid out for me, or am I making it myself? "
39 " To be in love was to be dazed twenty times a morning: by the latticework of frost on his windshield; by a feather loosed from his pillow; by a soft, pink rim of light over the hills. "
40 " It is not so much the science of snow for me, anymore. I’d rather just look at it. The light, the way it absorbs sound. The way we feel as if the more that falls, the more we are forgiven. "