Vera Jane Cook

“life reveals that which we may never have guessed, that some people are so undeserving of us.”

“She was well aware that the heart never breaks just once, it cracks open a million times across the span of a person’s life and as long as she kept living it would break again.”

“Younger people just don’t seem to realize that time eventually shows up for a payoff, and the longer it gives you, the more it will ask for , Bessie thought and nearly said aloud. I’ll take...”

“She didn’t want to go to that place, and she had to force herself not to, but it was standing between she and her father’s memory; to keep him close she’d have to allow the ache”

“The passing years often rob people of the truth. But then again, those passing years also allow people to recreate the truth.”

“The young should only know where they’re headed”

“The devil is a gentleman in disguise, Bessie.”

“There is impotency being haunted by things we can’t change; being stuck in your own damn mistakes isn’t healthy. But when I think about the things I need to do right now, and possibly won’t,...”

“Sometimes, when husbands stay out of the way, friendship was easier between women”

“How can you live as long as me and not see the losses and the gains and accept the change as something to be responsible for?”

“Life must be much more evident when one is always suffering.”

“She looks real delicate, the type to cry at sad movies but she never does. Sometimes she even laughs when someone dies at the end of a movie, and when I look at her like she's missing marble...”

“Everybody has got to hate someone, human nature”

“Memories that cease to be painful are still nostalgic and nostalgia made her sad, always about a loss of time.”

“Angus had been hurt deeply by what John Peter had done, that he might have lost a friend in such a horrible way. I could see that. But even aside from the stupid thing John Peter had done, A...”

“Clarissa noticed his eyes, they were like indifferent tides, shielding knowledge of an impending storm”

“I am well practiced in avoidance and indifference though the hollowness in my soul resents her absence; I wear the mask I must.”

“I guess, if you ever had God figured out the universe would be split in thousands of pieces and it would disappear and we who have dreamed ourselves alive would all fade away in all those sp...”

“The ashes of our mistakes are between us. There's still smoke from the fire, isn't there?”

“Where is the truth then? Where does truth exist, behind the lie, within the lie? Is truth that which we seek to know or that which we avoid knowing?”