“Your hope lies in accepting your life as it now lies before you, forever changed. If you can do that, the peace you seek will follow. Forever changed. I am forever changed.”
“I don’t need to worry that Finch and I never filmed our wanderings. It’s okay that we didn’t collect souvenirs or that we never had time to pull it all together in a way that made sense to anyone else but us. The thing I realize is that it’s not what you take, but it’s what you leave.”
“Maybe, if I wear the glasses long enough, I can be like her. I can see what she saw. I can be both of us at once so no one will have to miss her, most of all me.”
“She sets down the bucket and undoes the latch. For a few seconds, all she does is breathe in the scent of the flowers, and then she turns to me and, without a word, kisses me. When she pulls away, she says, ‘No more winter at all. Finch, you brought me spring.’”
“Suddenly I’m having one of those moments that you have after losing someone - when you feel as if you’ve been kicked in the stomach and all your breath is gone, and you might never get it back. I want to sit down in the dirty, littered ground right now and cry until I can’t cry anymore.”
“‘Are you feeling okay?’ I try not to sound like the blaming girlfriend. Why won’t you spend time with me? Why won’t you call me back? Don’t you like me anymore?”
“I think of my own epitaph, still to be written, and all the places I’ll wander. No longer rooted, but gold, flowing. I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me.”
“I stand in front of the mirror and study my face.…It is the face of a sad, lonely girl something bad has happened to. I wonder if my face will ever look the same again, or if I’ll always see it in my reflection - Finch, Eleanor, loss, heartache, guilt, death.”