Everything hurt and nothing killed me.

As every reader knows, the social contract between you and a book you love is not complete until you can hand that book to someone else and say, Here, you’re going to love this.

And maybe that’s true, except that of all the myriad and conflicting words I could use to describe Tavia, lucky isn’t one of them. At every turn, happiness was her decision.

For her it was all about taking a giant step backwards, back to her childhood and her happiest memories of following her grandmother in the garden, back to sitting in the dirt surrounded by zinnias. She had managed to peel off other people’s expectations in order to see what a life that was entirely her own would look like. It looked like the

I would give them the ability both to love and not to care.

I suspect this is to remind us of the holiness of the ephemeral: we’re always so busy looking towards (for) the eternal.

Influence is a combination of circumstance and luck: what we are shown and what we stumble upon in those brief years when our hearts and minds are fully open.

People want you to want what they want. If you want the same things they want, then their want is validated. If you don’t want the same things, your lack of wanting can, to certain people, come across as judgment.

no matter the hand she was dealt, it always looked like she was winning.