The Hummingbird War by Joan Shott

"...If you love someone you never leave them, and they never leave you. The empty space just fills in a little with other things in your life and you learn to live again." p. 16

"...when you love someone you do what's best for them." p. 75

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The first time I was ever called ugly, I was thirteen.........
     Constantine sat down next to me, at the kitchen table. I heard the cracking of her swollen joints. She pressed her thumb hard in the palm of my hand something with both knew meant Listen. Listen to me.
     " Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision." Constantine was so close, I could see the blackness of her gums. "You gone have to ask yourself, Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?"
     She kept her thumb pressed hard in my hand. I nodded that I understood. I was just smart enough to realize she meant white people. And even though I still felt miserable, and knew that I was, most likely, ugly, it was the first time she ever talked to me like I was someone other than my mother's white child. All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.
p. 74

Someone whose eyes simply said, without words, You are fine with me. p.76

...and that's when I got to wondering, what would happen if I told her she something good, ever day?
p. 107

"...Saying thank you, when you really mean it, when you remember what someone done for you....it's so good. p. 306

"All I'm saying is, kindness don't have no boundaries." p.368

There is so much you don't know about a person. I wonder if I could've made her days a little bit easier, if I tried. If I'd treated her a little nicer. Wasn't that the point of the book?  For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought. p. 492

The Soldier's Wife by Margaret Leroy

"How can you ever know what the right thing is? How can you ever know?" she says.
"You can't. I keep wondering too. Whether I've made an awful mistake....." p.34

Brian, her elder son, was lost at Trondheim, in the Norwegian campaign. After it happened, I would panic sometimes when I was with her, afraid of the gaps in conversations, as though they were cliffs you could fall from-afraid of saying his name. Once I told her, I'm so frightened of reminding you, I don't want to make you upset....And she said, Vivienne, it's not as though you're reminding me of something I've forgotten. It's not as though I don't think of him every moment of every day. The only time I don't think of him is when I'm fast asleep-then every morning I wake up and I have to learn it again. p. 35

"Which is the best book here?" he says.
I smile.
"That's an impossible question," I say. p.154

but then of course life intervened, as it has a habit of doing. p.157

" Getting old is strange," I say. It isn't at all how you think it's going to be." ....."Yet sometimes I feel as if I'm still waiting for my life to begin." I'm speaking slowly working out exactly what I mean......."....But life doesn't wait - it trickles between your fingers, trickles away....."
"Sometimes I feel as though the real things are passing me by. As though I've been pushed to the margins of life...."p.158

And I think just for a moment that yes, that was sad, and how could you live, not knowing when the one you loved would leave you. And then thinking that it's always like that. p.184

"But life doesn't always give you what you want," he says. His eyes on me. "Well most of the time it doesn't." p. 186

"Maybe it's my fault. maybe I've read her too many stories.'
He smiles - that smile I love, that fills his eyes with light.
"A child cannot be read too many stories," he says. "That is impossible." p.258

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli

 Years later Linh would wish that there had been some sign that this moment was the perfect one, balanced on the edge of changing, that the three of them would never again be together and as happy as they were then. But even if he had known, how did one hold time? p. 201

"Remember asking why the people supposed to love us the most are the ones who try to stop us doing what we love?" p. 210

Only the last line spoke to her so she could hear his voice: Each night I pray life is coming back to you, a piece at a time, just as on the burned hills the grass reappears. She studied the photo more closely. The day on the beach at Vung Tau. Linh staring not at the camera but at her. Of course. She had known but ignored what she knew. The war wouldn't be over for her until she saw that grass reappear on those scarred hills.
      This is what happened when one left one's home - pieces of oneself scattered all over the world, no one place ever completely satisfied, always a nostalgia for the place left behind. p. 277

"I survived." She forced herself to be nonchalant, not able to stand his pity.
"It should have been me."
"Much easier to be hurt rather than be the one watching it." p.301

The body, he knew, has a memory all its own. the shape of a baby in one's arms will be imprinted forever, the cup of a lover's chin. p.306

One came to love another through repeated touch, he believed, the way a mother bonded with her newborn, the way his family had slept in the communal room, brushing against one another, a patterning through nerve endings, a laying of pulse against pulse, creating a rhythm of blood, and so now he touched, strangers, only fleetingly,without hope. p.326

His anguish had grown skeletal in its solitude. He wished it didn't have be so, that one could ingest pain and keep it from others, but instead it seemed one could only lessen it by inflicting little cuts and bruises of it on another. p. 335

Pictures of Hollis Woods by Patricia Reilly Giff

     "Do it on my drawing," I said.
     "Never," she told me. It's your world, it belongs to you."..... "Drawing is what you see of the world, truly see."....
     "And sometimes what you see is so deep in your head you're not even sure of what you're seeing. But when it's down there on paper, and you look at it, really look, you'll see the way things are."
     I frowned. "Look at a picture one way and you'll see one thing," I said. "Look again and you might see something else. That's what the Old Man..." I shook my head. "A friend of mine said that once."
     ...."But that's the world isn't it? You have to keep looking to find the truth."

"And something else," she said. "You, the artist, can't hide from the world, because you're putting yourself down there too."
".... your soul is right there in front of you." She pointed to the sketch I'd drawn...  (p.45)

"You're going to be something, you and that language you speak on paper." She drew her other hand waving. "I love what you have to say, Hollis Woods." (p.46)

In my mind was a picture of Beatrice brushing her hair off her forehead. "Drawing is a language," she had said. "You have to learn to speak it." (p. 148)

"Sometimes we learn from our own drawings; things are there that we thought we didn't know." (p.150)

Great House by Nicole Krauss

    There is beautiful prose in this book, but I did not enjoy reading it. Check out my review on Goodreads.com. My picks:
When I was with Yoav, everything in me that had been sitting stood up. He had a way of looking at me with a kind of unabashed directness that made me shiver. It's something amazing to feel that for the first time someone is seeing you as you really are, not as they wish you, or you wish yourself, to be. (p. 134)

Look at him, she used to say to me, a man like any other, coming home laden with groceries. And yet, in his soul all the dreams, the sadness and joy, love and regret, all the bitter loss of the people he passes on the street fight for a place in his words. (p. 145)

No, what I'm speaking of now, or trying to speak of, is something else, the sense that her self-sufficiency - the proof she carried within her that she could withstand unthinkable tragedy on her own, that in fact the extreme solitude she had constructed around herself, reducing herself, folding in on herself, turning a silent scream into the weight of private work, was precisely what enabled her to withstand it - made it impossible for her to ever need me as I needed her. (p.256)

The dead take their secrets with them, or so they say.  But it isn't really true, is it? The secrets of the dead have a viral quality, and find a way to keep themselves alive in another host. No, I was guilty of nothing more than advancing the inevitable. (p. 258)

The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel by Michael Scott

It's funny how I read this at the same time I was reading These is my Words by Nancy E. Turner and the one quote that stood out to me is similar to one in Turner's book. The quote:

"And once begun, change cannot be reversed."

Maybe it has to do with my own feelings about and resistance to change.