Charles Martin

“From out of your heart, you speak."-Emma, When Crickets Cry”

“Never judge someone by their relatives.”

“Well...letting the cat out of the bag is a lot easier than putting it in.”

“He traced a line in the dirt with his toe. ‘This is a battlefield. Has been since Cain killed Abel. And don’t let it get complicated. Gray it ain’t. It’s black and white. Good versus evil. You might as well choose sides right now.”

“Forgiveness offered -especially when so undeserved - cuts chains off the human heart that no other power in any universe anywhere can rattle much less break....love did what hatred can not and never will.”

“You know sometimes when I walk into your room with a flashlight or a candle?' I nodded. 'Well, love is like that. Light doesn't have to announce it's way into a room or ask the darkness to leave. It just is. It walks ahead of you, and the darkness rolls back like a tide.' She waved her hand across the room. 'It has to 'cause darkness can't be where light is.”

“But what I knew in my head stayed up there, swirling about the other ten zillion things I had retained. That knowledge informed my actions, what I did and how I did it.What Emma knew filtered from her head down into her heart and informed who she was—what I have since come to call the Infinite Migration. If my wonderings about life were scientific, bent toward examination and physical discovery, Emma’s all leaned toward matters of the heart. While I could understand and explain the physics behind a rainbow, Emma saw the colors. When it came to life, I saw each piece and how they all fit together, and Emma saw the image on the face of the puzzle. And every now and then, she’d walk me through the door into her world and show it to me.”

“In the history of mankind, no single person yet has learned to swim by having the strokes explained. At some point, they dive in.”

“I am speaking from experience when I say that forgiveness offered - especially when so undeserved - cuts chains off the human heart that no other power in any universe anywhere can rattle much less break.”

“Reese, your books might not tell you this, so I will. Every heart has two parts, the part that pumps and the part that loves. If you’re going to spend your life fixing broken hearts, then learn about both. You can’t just fix one with no concern for the other.”

“The books talked about it [the heart] as if it were a sump pump stuck down in the muck and mire of somebody’s backyard. Never in all my scientific reading did I encounter anything that talked about a broken heart. Never did I read anything about what the heart felt, how it felt or why it felt. Feeling and knowing weren’t important, only understanding”

“Child," she said placing her head to mine and her callused fingers on my cheek, "you can whip it and beat it senseless, you can drag it through the streets and spin on it, you can even dangle it from a tree, drive spikes trough it, and drain the last breath from it, but in the end, no matter what you do, and no matter how hard you try to kill it, love wins.”

“You put a new heart in Emma a long time ago, it just wasn’t the kind you were thinking of.” He laughed to himself. “Hope is an amazing thing. I saw it in Emma, saw it with my own eyes.”