Secret Heart

by David Almond

Joe felt the lark singing inside him and the tiger prowling inside him. he looked at the teacher, and knew that Bleak Winters was never anything except Bleak Winters. He looked at the children. He knew that they, like him, might have larks and tigers inside them, but they kept them hidden, and one day their larks and tigers might disappear, just as Bleak Winters' had. He wanted to tell them this, he wanted to draw them away from Winters and toward the tent and the wasteland, but he didn't have the words.

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They wandered across the stony earth.

"Maybe you are Tomasso," said Corinna. "Maybe you are and you don't know it. Maybe we're all something else and we don't know it."

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Joe closed his eyes. He felt Nanty's hands cradling his head, and he felt how tender they were.

"How can a thing like a head be held within a lady's finger?" she whispered. "Here's dreams and memories and ancient tales that's being told and told. Here's stars that shine a billion miles away and deep dark caves and forests and Helmouth and teachers and mothers and horns of unicorns and the stripes of tigers. Here's a thing that's bigger than the world and all the worlds there ever was. And look. All held within a little tent of tender bone and skin and cradled in a lady's fingers. How can this be so?"

Joe licked his lips, attempted no answer.

"There's them that say they know how it is so. They look inside the tender bone and skin and tell us what's inside and how it came to be there and what's right in there and what's wrong in there." She sighed. Her fingers shifted, and it was as if they melted and began to mingle with the bone and skin of his skull. "There is them that has already tried to tell you this, Joe Maloney. Isn't there?"

"Y-y-"

"Do not believe them when they tell you, Joe Maloney."

He heard the squeak of the lid as she opened the box.

"What would happen if Joe Maloney's head was lifted open? What would happen if they looked inside to take something out? What would happen to Joe Maloney's worlds?"

"Dun-dunn-"

"Nor does Nanty. Where does the dreams go when the tent of bone is broke?"

An American Childhood

by Annie Dillard

Late at night on Christmas Eve, she carried us to our high bedroom, and darkened the room, and opened the window, and held us awed in the freezing stillness, saying--and we could hear the edge of tears in her voice--"Do you hear them? Do you hear the bells, the little bells, on Santa's sleigh?" We marveled and drowsed, smelling the piercingly cold night and the sweetness of Mother's warm neck, hearing in her voice so much pent emotion, feeling the familiar strength in the crook of her arms, and looking out over the silent streetlights and the chilled stars over the rooftops of the town. "Very faint, and far away--can you hear them coming?" And we could hear them coming, very faint and far away, the bells on the flying sleigh.

Harry Potter & The Sorcerer's Stone

by J.K. Rowling

There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.

winner

Well, ang... It's you!

Comment #1 - Journal of Healing.

Thanks for the entries, everyone. I have added your faves to my reading list and look forward to enjoying them myself. You are all lovely for humoring me.
Long live the written word! --V

mission accomplished

This morning I finished my 100th book of 2010! To celebrate, I've decided to give away one of my faves from this year.

Here are your choices:
- The Hotel Under the Sand, by Kage Baker
- An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, by Elizabeth McCracken
- The Ingenious Edgar Jones, by Elizabeth Garner
- The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Barry
- The Princess and the Hound, by Mette Ivie Harrison


To enter, simply leave a comment telling me which book you might like to win. For a bonus entry: tell me the title/author of one of your favorite books.

Thanks for playing! --V

Anne's House of Dreams

by L.M. Montgomery

"Oh, I know I've been very selfish," sighed Anne. "I love Gilbert more than ever--and I want to live for his sake. But it seems as if a part of me was buried over there in that little harbour graveyard--and it hurts so much that I'm afraid of life."

"It won't hurt so much always, Anne."

"The thought that it may stop hurting sometimes hurts me worst of all, Marilla."

A Woman's Book of Grieving

by Nessa Rapaport

Undo it, take it back, make every day the previous one until I am returned to the day before the one that made you gone. Or set me on an airplane travelling west, crossing the dateline again and again, losing this day, then that, until the day of loss is still ahead, and you are here, instead of sorrow.

Empty Cradle, Broken Heart

by Deborah L. Davis

Remember, bad things happen to good people without stripping them of their goodness. Regardless of what has happened to you, you are still a worthwhile person and a good mother who deserves the best life has to offer.

The Hotel Under the Sand

by Kage Baker

One day a storm came and swept away everything that Emma had, and everything that Emma knew. When it had done all that, it swept away Emma too. It might have been a storm with black winds, with thunder and lightning and rising waves. It might have been a storm with terrible anger and policemen coming to the door, and strangers, hospitals, courtrooms, and nightmares. It might have been a storm with soldiers, and fire, and hiding in cellars listening to shooting overhead. There are different kinds of storms. But Emma faced the storm that swept over her, and found a way to save herself.

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She wanted to cry, but Emma knew that if she started crying now for everyone and everything she had lost, she would never be able to stop crying. So she dusted herself off instead, and started walking away down the beach to explore. I have no place of my own anymore, she thought, but maybe I can make one.

The storm hadn't taken everything she had, after all. It could never take away her brave heart, or her cleverness.

Mira, Mirror

by Mette Ivie Harrison

But love is born in life, and death cannot end it.

The Princess and the Hound

by Mette Ivie Harrison

"Perhaps I was born different. Or made different by the parents who raised me," said George honestly. Did anyone ever know why he was the person that he was, animal magic or no?

"Perhaps I also made myself different, because I wished to be," George added after a moment.

The Sea, The Sea

by Iris Murdoch

As I lay there, listening to the soft slap of the sea, and thinking these sad and strange thoughts, more and more and more stars had gathered, obliterating the separateness of the Milky Way and filling
up the whole sky. And far far away in the ocean of gold, stars were silently shooting and falling and finding their fates, among those billions and billions of merging golden lights. And curtain after
curtain of gauze was quietly removed, and I saw stars behind stars behind stars, as in the magical Odeon of my youth. And I saw into
the vast soft interior of the universe which was slowly and gently turning itself inside out. I went to sleep, and in my sleep I seemed to hear a sound of singing.

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There was a complete and yet somehow conscious silence, as if the travelling planet were noiselessly breathing.

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That no doubt is how the story ought to end, with the seals and the stars, explanation, resignation, reconciliation, everything picked up into some radiant bland ambiguous higher significance, in calm of mind, all passion spent. However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossiblity of living happily or virtuously ever after...

Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

An American Childhood

by Annie Dillard

Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in media res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way.

Fairytale, a True Story

by Monica Kullig

"I think I know how it is to be grown up," said Frances, thoughtfully. "It's when you can feel... how someone else feels... who isn't you."

My Beautiful Child

by Lisa Desmini & Matt Mahurin

I want to show you everything, my beautiful child. I want to show you how big the sky is and how green the grass is. I want to show you what was here before you were born, and how many ways there are to say hello.

My beautiful child, how strong your cry is! And how bright your smile can be. I want you to smell a spring day, and crush an autumn leaf in your hand. I want to show you everything...

Tales of Protection

by Erik Fosnes Hansen

She noticed that she was about to lose her balance again, forced herself to stay erect. And suddenly it semed to her that this was just a repetition of something, that she had undergone this before; she thought about what she had done as a child, when she had wanted to escape the bad thing, then she had just closed her eyes and said kare kare kare, ma ma ma, without a sound; she had floated away and let everything happen to her, and she had survived, because she had a golden place far behind her eyelids that no one knew about, behind kare kare kare, ma ma ma, where she was alone and nothing could reach her.

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"And in the Gospel of John: 'Whosoever hateth his brother, is a murderer.'"

"What does that mean?"

"It means," Aid says slowly in his grating voice, "that we're all brothers."

House Rules: A Memoir

by Rachel Sontag

It's never the loneliness that nibbles away at a person's insides, but not having room inside themselves to be comfortably alone.

The Secret Scripture

by Sebastian Barry

Dear reader! Dear reader, if you are gentle and good, I wish to clasp your hand. I wish -- all manner of impossible things.

After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.

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The terror and hurt in my story happened because when I was young I thought others were the authors of my fortune or misfortune; I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made of imaginary bricks and mortar against the horrors and the cruel, dark tricks of time that assail us, and be the author therefore of themselves.

The Bell Jar

by Sylvia Plath

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantine and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above those figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which fig to choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

The Gathering

by Anne Enright

We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love anymore.

The Invitation

by Oriah

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened up by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain. I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance in wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty, even when it's not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours or mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, "Yes!"

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside, when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself, and if you truly like the company you keep in empty moments.

The Ingenious Edgar Jones

by Elizabeth Garner

It is one thing to be promised a fine future and quite another to sit and wait for it.

Peter Pan

by J.M. Barrie

"I wasn't crying about mothers. I was crying because I can't get this shadow to stick. And I wasn't crying."

The Magician's Elephant

by Kate DiCamillo

"But that is impossible," said Peter.
"Magic is always impossible," said the magician. "It begins with the impossible and ends with the impossible and is impossible in between. That is why it is magic."

Moving Beyond Depression

by Dr. Gregory Jantz

I am brave enough to understand my pain. I am strong enough to move beyond it.

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When you change your direction, you change your destiny.

The Goose Girl

by Shannon Hale

Poor gosling. It hurts to be lost. And worse to be home with no kind of homecoming... I'll be lucky if I can do as well as you when all this's done; just a bit out of breath, a bit bruised and scratched, a bit wiser and sadder for it all.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

by Stephen Chbosky

I guess we are who we are for alot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.