Quotes from book

The Storyteller

“I pointed to the wound. "It's missing," I said.

My grandmother smiled, and that was all it took for me to stop seeing the scar, and to recognize her again. "Yes," she said. "But see how much of me is left?”

“Fiction comes in all shapes and sizes. Secrets, lies, stories. We all tell them. Sometimes, because we hope to entertain. Sometimes, because we need to distract. And sometimes, because we have to.”

“Sometimes all you need to live one more day is a good reason to stick around.”

“Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.”

“You would be surprised at the lengths you will go to believe the best about someone if you truly love him”

“My brother believed in all sorts of mythical creatures: pixies, dragons, werewolves, honest men.”

“That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?”

“Be kind to others before you take care of yourself; make whoever you're with feel like they matter.”

“Loneliness is a mirror, and recognizes itself.”

“The person may have a scar, but it also means they have a story”

“That's the paradox of loss: How can something that's gone weigh us down so much?”

“My grandmother told me that her father used to ask her a riddle: What must you break apart in order to bring a family close together?

Bread, of course.”

“Sometimes, all it takes to become human again is someone who can see you that way, no matter how you present on the surface.”

“She became whoever she needed to be to survive, but she never let anyone else define her.”

“It doesn't matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it’s there.”

“I never said I do not remember, my grandmother corrects. I said I prefer to forget.”

“The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.”

“If history has a habit of repeating itself, doesn't someone have to stay behind to shout out a warning?”