The Things We Cannot Say

The consolation a parent leaves behind: a flower that needs winter to bloom.

Caroline wiped her cheek with the back of her gardening glove, leaving a dark smudge below one eye, then pulled off her gloves. ‘But it’s fitting in a way - Father loved the fact that a lilac only blossoms after a harsh winter.’ Caroline reached over and smoothed the hair back from my brow with a light touch. How many times had my mother done that? ‘It’s a miracle all of this beauty emerges after such hardship, don’t you think?

Lilac Girls · Martha Hall Kelly

Time doesn't heal so much as hand you something to wear over the wound.

Maybe time didn’t heal wounds exactly, but it gave you a kind of armor, or a new perspective. A way to remember with a smile instead of a sob.

Night Road · Kristin Hannah

When beauty enters the body before the mind can name it.

I didn’t know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only thing I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt like I could see through to something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way.

The Secret Life of Bees · Sue Monk Kidd