Blue Book, a collection of quotes, page two of prose

"We all have our demons to deal with, Little Pigeon. It's when we cherish them — cradle them to our breasts and feed them, day after day—that's when they curdle our souls."
– Susan Fletcher, Shadow Spinner

"Sometimes I wonder if the stories you tell begin to tug at your life, begin to change it in some mysterious way. Not just that you learn from stories, though that can happen, too. But even deeper. Could it be that, by choosing certain stories, you draw to yourself the happenings inside them? So that your life begins to echo your stories?"
– Susan Fletcher, Shadow Spinner

"It seemed that in this world we were piling up hurt upon hurt, and hate upon hate, and the hurt upon hurt again. Forgiveness. We couldn't forgive. We could only hate when we were hurt. And then the hurt and the hate would start up again—all in a terrible circle."
– Susan Fletcher, Shadow Spinner

"There's nothing wrong with loving someone. It's hating—that's what's wrong.
– Susan Fletcher, Shadow Spinner

"When people's emotions are involved they don't want to listen."
– Bette Greene, Summer of My German Soldier

"... taking care of someone else made me feel good. Like discovering you're more than you thought you were. More ever than you hoped to be."
– Bette Greene, Morning is a Long Time Coming

"When you take someone else's world away from him, you feel the loss so strongly ... because you still have your world, in which the sky is blue and the sun shines."
– Erik Christian Haugaard, The Samurai's Tale

"Don't ever become a pessimist, Ira; a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun—and neither can stop the march of events."
– Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough For Love

"There's one nice thing I remember. The candles. All those candles inside the trenches, lighting the French night. Now that's a pretty sight. A downright comforting sight."
– Karen Hesse, A Time of Angels

"I turned over in my mind what he said about the one nice thing in the trenches of France. The candles. I shut my eyes, imagining France lit up by hundreds of candles — strings of light shining up from the trenches as if the earth itself had cracked along a thousand splintery veins and through those veins flowed endless streams of night."
– Karen Hesse, A Time of Angels

"I picture a place where things are beautiful and still and true and the few people you meet when you go outside really listen and say only the things that matter."
– Barbara Ware Holmes, Letters to Julia

"She opened her dresser drawer and pulled out the notebook where she copied poems and sayings she liked, to remind her that somewhere the world was different. Somewhere people thought about things that mattered and tried to put good into the world."
– Barbara Ware Holmes, Letters to Julia

"It's lonely seeing beauty where no one else sees it."
– Barbara Ware Holmes, Letters to Julia

"Sometimes it just seems too appropriate that the kids at the center have started calling me 'Dizzy'! On Friday I let them all spin me around, and for one second, after I stopped being dizzy, the world seemed perfectly clear and straight. Journal, I loved that second."
– Barbara Ware Holmes, Letters to Julia

"She hesitated once with a feeling of dread. Was he weird? Would he have hurt her? No. He looked like an angel in a Renaissance painting. Could beauty hurt?"
– Annette Curtis Klause, The Silver Kiss

"I knew how I felt, but I couldn't come up with a good enough reason why I should feel that way. I believed unhappiness was something you had to earn through a suitable measure of suffering, the way the characters in my favorite books struggled with blindness, polio, Nazis, shipwreck, blizzards — unspeakable adversities through which, damaged but undefeated, they endured. And what had I ever suffered? Not one damn thing. No poetic privations or romantic diseases. The way I saw it, my life — with its twelve-year-old particulars of tuna sandwiches and math homework and watching The Waltons on Thursday nights — was way too mundane for suffering."
– Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game