“Love is a choice. It’s a decision.’ She told us, ‘It flows into, through, and out of each person like a river. If you try to stop it, it’ll sneak around until It finds another heart and breaks through.”
— Charles Martin
“He picked up one of Lorna’s roses and set it in my lap. “Here.” I picked it up and smelled it. He poked me in the shoulder. “See what I mean? Thorns don’t stop you from sniffing. Or putting them in a vase on the kitchen table. You work around them…. Cause the rose is worth it… Think what you’d miss.”
— Charles Martin
“I watched her—the way her shoulders moved with the tilt of her head, how her smile lit up the six people around her, how her hair, tucked behind her ears, framed her face like baby’s breath. I thought about how the sound of her heart beating sounded the rhythm for our dance atop the magnolia floor. I wanted to tell her all this, but didn’t know how. Just because something is broken doesn’t mean it’s no good. Doesn’t mean you throw it away. It just means it’s broken, and broken is okay. I wanted to tell her that broken is still beautiful, still works, still wakes me in the morning, and at the end of every day past and those to come, I can love broken.”
— Charles Martin
“When we’re down and the momentum is stacked against us. Those are the moments when we find out what we’re made of. When we learn to trust and lean on each other.”
— Charles Martin
“I sat in that room and realized that you can cut off a finger, cut off a hand, even cut off a leg, but if you take a woman’s breast, you are cutting more than just a body part.”
— Charles Martin
“The problem with a wish list was what it told you about the person who wrote it. If it’s honest, it’s a rock-bottom, barebones, clear shot all the way to someone’s soul.Hats can do the same thing.”
— Charles Martin
“From out of your heart, you speak.”-Emma, When Crickets Cry”
— Charles Martin
“Well…letting the cat out of the bag is a lot easier than putting it in.”
— Charles Martin
“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.”
— Charles Martin
“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.”
— Charles Martin
“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.”
— Charles Martin
“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.”
— Charles Martin
“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.”
— Charles Martin
“In the history of mankind, no single person yet has learned to swim by having the strokes explained. At some point, they dive in.”
— Charles Martin
“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.”
— Charles Martin
“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”
— Charles Martin
“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.”
— Charles Martin
“Never judge someone by their relatives.”
— Charles Martin
“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.”
— Charles Martin