1
…People are rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It is not fair, to treat people as if they are finished beings. Everyone is always becoming and unbecoming.Kathleen Winter
2
They can admit the new world exists, dangerous and irresistible. Cosy is not what awakening youth wants. Safety is not what it wants. The material world is not what it wants either.Kathleen Winter
3
You might want to sit in public squares and people watch for an hour in one place and a month in another. I can tell by the way you're peeling that grapefruit. You want to get lost. Somewhere where they have ordinary life you can join in. Slip right in there and have a bowl of soup in the clothes you have on now. Go hear a concert you read about stapled to a telephone pole. There are lots of places like that in the world. .Kathleen Winter
4
See?” my mother would say, smiling at me and my sister, Carol, in turn. “We live in the greatest country on earth. See how lucky we are?” And yet the ash continued swirling down, and the smells of death came through the windows, crept under the door, hung in our carpets and curtains, and screamed of her lie. Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar? And if you lie to a liar, is the sin somehow negated or reversed? These are the kinds of questions I ask myself now: in these dark, watery hours, when night and day are interchangeable. No. Not true.Lauren Oliver
5
Why would a white caribou come down to Beaver River, where the woodland herd lives? Why would she leave the Arctic tundra, where the light blazes incandescent, to haunt these shadows? Why would any caribou leave her herd to walk, solitary, thousands of miles? The herd is comfort. The herd is a fabric you can't cut or tear, passing over the land. If you could see the herd from the sky, if you were a falcon or a king eider, it would appear like softly floating gauze over the face of the snow, no more substantial than a cloud. "We are soft, " the herd whispers. "We have no top teeth. We do not tear flesh. We do not tear at any part of life. We are gentleness itself. Why would any of us break from the herd? Break, apart, separate, these are hard words. The only reason any of us would become one, and not part of the herd, is if she were lost. .Kathleen Winter