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1 " She frowned at him. 'You are in love with solitude.''Is there a better cure for the world than solitude? "
― Meg Rosoff , The Bride's Farewell
2 " Each evening she held his head in her hands and ran her aching fingers thru the thick ruff of fur around his neck. He burrowed against her, sighing devotion. "
3 " For those poor souls who can only think of the terrible fear and danger of a runaway horse, think of this: a speed like water flowing over stone, a skimming sensation that hovers and dips while the world spins around and the wind drags your skin taut across your bones. You can close your eyes and lose yourself in the rhythm, because nothing you do or shout or wish for will happen until the running makes up its mind to stop. So you hold steady, balancing yourself in the wake, and unhook your mind from the everyday while you sit at the silent center of it all and hope that the feeling won't stop till you're good and ready for life to be ordinary once more. "
4 " She accepted the permission bestowed by passion to live entirely in the present. "
5 " Incessantly, it seemed, life plagued her with responsibilities, made her fall in love, ripped away any consolation she might find. Sisters and parents, brothers and horses… All staked their claim on her, each conspiring to weigh down her soul… Every day brought unwanted connections, losses, and complications that broke her heart. "
6 " The open road. What a trio of words. What a vision of blue sky and untouched hills and narrow trails heading God knew where and being free—free and hungry, free and cold, free and wet, free and lost. Who could mourn such conditions, faced with the alternative? "
7 " (Mam) ignorant as a thistle, married to a drunk and pushing out baby after baby, each of which had to be clothed and fed until it grew up and left, or died. "
8 " I shall bring him his tea and work myself to death by the time I am thirty bearing children and scrubbing floors and working in the fields digging turnips till my hands bleed and my back gives out and everyone urges me to keep on for just one more year, at which point I will die of exhaustion and the meagerness of my own life. I will love him and care for him, will never tell him to get his own tea, or sweep the ashes from the hearth or give birth to his own twelfth child himself. "