Kaitlin

“The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.” –218

I keep coming back to read this book again and again. Meg Rosoff is an absolutely amazing writer that brings together very particular elements for a reading experience that changes the way you look at life. I could not say enough good things.

“A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen.”

“Incessantly, it seemed, life plagued her with responsibilities, made her fall in love, ripped away any consolation she might find. Sisters and parents, brothers and horses... All staked their claim on her, each conspiring to weigh down her soul... Every day brought unwanted connections, losses, and complications that broke her heart.”

I was suppose to read this my junior year of high school for a project. I didn't read it. I got an F on the project. I figured 7 years or so later it was time to get it read.

The whole scene where Pyncheon bites it, all I could think of is how Hawthorne is like a cat playing with its food before it gobbles it up.