Lauren Wolk

“Anyone who's ever gone from warm and bright to cold and dark knows how I felt.”

“I didn't tell him that I'd put his awful stories in boxes and stacked them on a shelf at the back of my mind. I could hear a quieter version of them still, from their dark place, through all the other business that occupied my brain, but I wouldn't unlid those boxes until I was ready to hear [his] stories again as they wanted to be heard.”

“All around us, birds woke up the sky.”

“But the wind always swept my words away like cloud shadows, as if it mattered more that I said them, than who heard them.”

“Somewhere, excitement waited for me like an uncut cake.”

“If my life was to be just a single note in an endless symphony, how could I not sound it out for as long and as loudly as I could?”