206 Quotes by Christina Baker Kline

To get it all done I have to dim my brain, turn it down by notches like the flat-turn knob on a gas lantern, leaving only a nub of flame.

It's painful to hold out hope for the things that once brought you joy. You have to find ways to make yourself forget.

marrying Jim was like stepping into water the exact same temperature as the air. I barely had to adjust to the change.

A trick to play in your mind when your troubled. You think of yourself as a tree, with all the rings inside. And every ring is someone you care about, or a place you’ve been. You carry them with you wherever you go.

I get the sense that my abandonment, and the circumstances that brought me to them, matter little to them, compared to the need I might fill in their lives. - (Niamh/Dorothy)

Molly learned long ago that a lot of the heartbreak and betrayal that other people fear their entire lives, she has already faced. Father dead. Mother off the deep end. Shuttled around and rejected time and time again. And still she breathes and sleeps and grows taller. She wakes up every morning and puts on clothes. So when she says it's okay, what she means is that she knows she can survive just about anything.

She has never tried to find out what happened to her family — her mother or her relatives in Ireland. But over and over, Molly begins to understand as she listens to the tapes, Vivian has come back to the idea that the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn a corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles.

He reaches over and touches my necklace. "You still have it. That gives me faith." "Faith in what?""God, I suppose. No, I don't know. Survival.

Molly is the opposite. So many things have gone wrong for her in her seventeen years that she’s come to expect it. When something does go right, she hardly knows what to think.