Paris: day 1

My account of our trip to Paris is not all chronological. I find writing to be easiest and most enjoyable when I write what I'm in the mood for in the moment rather than following a schedule or calendar. Paris-post number three is about day one. 

Let's start this off with an excited airplane selfie:

The way the timing of our flights worked out left me wide awake for the entire 14 hours of travel. That was close to fourteen luscious hours of reading time, and I used it well. I love having a Kindle full of fun books that are more interesting than the airplane movies! While I am hesitant to admit what I read, I was glad when a friend told me about these books so here's my bubblegum travel reading list: everything by Nichole Van. Humor, solid command of the English language, unapologetic time travel, clean romance, mild PG swearing, spunky writing style--in short, the perfect airplane read. I'm halfway through her last book, and I'm a little bit sad about it.

After 14 hours of travel, we arrived at the Charles de Gaulle airport at 7am on Valentine's Day (10pm back home). Our hotel check-in time wasn't till 1pm, though, so no naps for us! We took the train from the airport, navigated the metro to our hotel's neighborhood, and dropped our bags off with the helpful proprietress around 9am before heading out on an all-day Valentine date. We walked and wandered for nearly three hours, taking in the glorious Paris-ness of it all in the cloudy wet COLD till I was half frozen, then took refuge in a boulangerie with our first pastry of the week: beloved, classic pain-au-chocolat for me (chocolate filled croissant).

Soaking it all in. I have a thing for old cobbled streets. They add so much to the rustic, historic ambiance! Not to mention, they disguise a whole lot more city filth than plain old concrete or asphalt. 

Restaurant-shopping. I was too dull-witted and tired to take any pictures during our 3 hour walk before lunch, but trust me, it was scenic and Parisian, if a tad cloudy. 

Yum.

We browsed a blessedly warm cozy bookstore while waiting for noon when the restaurants would open. At the stroke of noon, we selected a rustic restaurant in the ever-affordable Latin Quarter and sat down to a classique 100 minute 3-course French luncheon. FYI, the Latin part of the Latin Quarter is not taco trucks; it refers to Latin the language, which the original scholarly inhabitants of that section of Paris spoke and studied at university. I still find it all very confusing/misleading.

After navigating lunch with a surly gray-haired French proprietor, we metro'd it back to our hotel and checked in at last. Jeff says the key is not to let the surly French people intimidate you, because most of them are automatically surly to linguistically inept English-speakers. But I am automatically intimidated by surly-ness in general, especially in a different language, especially especially in my third language, so I sat quiet as a mouse in my too-small chair while Jeff did all of the talking/asking/ordering/paying. I also felt only half awake, and my fuzzy jet lagged brain was not up to the challenge of attempting to make sense of my weakest language. It wasn't till the last day of our visit that I finally decided to try speaking a little more French myself, and even then, only in the safe-zone of church.

This little restaurant was quite quaint with stone walls and rough wooden ceiling beams. We usually order the menu, which is three courses, quoted with a specific exact price--all gratuity and any tax is included in the quoted price, so if you order the 10 euro menu, you pay exactly ten euros. It is so nice and non-mysterious. The restaurant provides 5-10 options for each course so you can mix and match what looks good. Maybe this explanation is redundant to some, but it's different than what I'm used to, and I love the menu system!

Jeff always likes to try interesting foods, and this time he had oysters with some sort of cream sauce for his first course. 

A steaming bowl of French onion soup with baguette and Emmentel cheese broiled on top is my absolute favorite antidote to that damp seeping cold. It's literally the ONLY time I ever like anything soggy. Baguettes were made to be soaked in that rich broth!

The main course. Yum. We were crammed into this itty bitty nook of a front window. My chair was pressed against a wall and I got slightly stuck when I tried to get up at the end. I was so cold it was all I could do to take off my hat and gloves. My bulky coat and scarf stayed ON. The front window that we were pressed up against was so drafty, my legs stayed icy the whole time. I tried putting my hat on my knees but it didn't help.

Upon depositing my backpack by the bed in our hotel room, I immediately laid down and fell into a scary-deep slumber. There was no transition: one minute I was awake, the next I was OUT. Staying up for 25 hours straight is hard! Jeff forced me to wake up at 4pm (I remember being really peeved about it). We video called our children and then walked up the street to the nearest little grocery store for some beloved French pantry staples: baguette, Camembert cheese, Yop yogurt, and Kellog's Extra (the most heavenly granola with toasted hazelnuts and chocolate pieces mixed in. I could write a love sonnet to Extra. Oh how I miss it!) After my four queasy ultra-barfy pregnancies, food in general does not interest me much. I don't really enjoy eating very many foods. I still eat, but it's annoying because I'm annoyingly picky after repeatedly puking up nearly everything available in our giant country for so many months. It's getting better with time, I suppose, but in general, food is not too exciting to me. But I get excited about Kellog's Extra with strawberry Yop on top. YUM. (and that French onion soup!)

France still uses plastic bags, by the way. I read a bunch of articles a few months ago about how we need to be more awesome like France and ban plastic grocery bags. Plastic bags were available at every store we went to in Paris. Another fun oddity we discovered: when a restaurant claims to sell tacos, they really mean their regular sandwich food, like kebab meat, will be wrapped in a tortilla instead of bread. Jeff and I got a kick out of that. In France, taco means the vehicle the food is wrapped in, not the style of food inside the tortilla. There was not a drop of salsa to be found. In the name of an authentic cultural experience, we steered clear of "tacos."

When planning this trip, our priorities when we searched for lodgings were location and availability of a kitchenette in the room. We struck GOLD this time around. The Hotel de Residence de la Mare was everything we could hope for in a relatively affordable European hotel--an enormous step up from our past situations. It was on a quiet dead-end street and our room opened up onto a private interior courtyard so it was even MORE quiet without any street even touching our walls. And the bathroom was over twice the size of our bathroom at home, which admittedly is not too hard to do, but felt luxurious nonetheless.

Back to day one, post-grocery shopping: we deposited the food in our kitchenette and took the metro over to the Eiffel Tower for a pre-dinner evening stroll.

 The evening sky was an interesting bluish color, and the wet pavement was artistically reflective. There were also quite a few people milling about, as usual. 

After sufficiently admiring Monsieur Eiffel, we hopped a metro and hiked back to our hotel for a quiet Valentine dinner of baguette, soft cheese, grape juice in wine glasses, and fruit:

We went on our very first date on Valentine's Day twelve years ago. Our twelfth Valentine's Day this year was easily the best!

L'eglise dans Paris

Good news! The jet lag is slowly retreating. My travel-sore gluteous was even on the mend until I spent 2 hours on the hard piano bench at church today. An hour or so of lying on my stomach after lunch has thankfully set that ache back on the road to recovery. The physical vestiges of our trip may be fading, but the memories are still bright and clear! Exactly one week ago, Jeff and I went to church in Paris. We took the metro a few stops down and walked the few remaining blocks to the church building. I love being part of a global church. Attending services in different countries is such a healthy dose 'o perspective! I love everything about it. Sometimes I think American Mormons get too caught up in peripheral cares, and I wish they could all attend church in Europe at least once or twice.

The church building didn't look any different from all of the other tall buildings lined side-by-side on the street. We walked through a gate and into a cobbled courtyard with a plaque by the door as the church's only identifying feature: l'église de jésus-christ des saints des derniers jours. It's even more of a mouthful in French than it is in English! After hanging our coats on hooks in the entryway, we followed piano music into the meeting room. It was all white: white ceiling, white tile floors, white walls, with red chairs set up in rows. At the front of the room there was a piano, a podium, and the sacrament table. It was all so unadorned and simple, but it still felt exactly like church. Members of the congregation were talking and greeting each other enthusiastically, their voices slightly amplified by the hard floor. Piano prelude music floated through the chatter. Everyone seemed so glad to be there. It felt good. A couple of kind people introduced themselves to us and a surprising number of them spoke English.

The entrance to the church building in its cobbled courtyard.

The bishop was an expat with an excellent American accent mixed in with his French. I listened to him conduct the meeting in fascination. He clearly had complete command of the French language, except the pesky guttural "re" foiled him every time. Listening to him simultaneously inspired hope and despair: hope that I would someday be able to understand and communicate well in French even if I never mastered the tougher sounds, and despair that I may never be able to speak beautiful French. Hah! 

The speakers were absolutely fascinating. A teenage boy gave a short talk about missionary work. He started out with the first two or three sentences in French, then switched to English (clearly his native tongue). A girl stood next to him at the podium, translating each sentence he spoke into French. The back-and-forth was mesmerizing. The girl was rather impressive. After the first talk was over, she went back to her seat up front and translated the next talk from French to English for the English speakers wearing headsets, speaking quietly into a microphone. 

The second talk was given by a woman who was a native French speaker. She spoke so beautifully and clearly that even I understood most of what she said! I felt pretty amazing for following along so well, and I even was able to go beyond simple word-to-word understanding to feeling the meaning of her message. She talked about choices and the importance of holding on to the word of God. She told the funniest story about a misbehaving dog and how every time she got mad at the dog and tried to force it to obey, it didn't listen, but when she was kind and showed love to the dog, it listened to her. I thought that was a very profound parable of God's love and how he wants us to make good choices and listen to his spirit, but he won't ever get mad at us or force us into anything. I wish I could remember more about this wonderful talk, but by the time it was over, my entire brain was focused so much on understanding French that memory was secondary.

We stood and sang a rest hymn, and singing in another language is always so cozy. Singing is a very unifying form of worship, but when I'm at home attending church in my own language, I rarely notice that aspect of hymn-singing. It's easy to feel isolated and self-conscious when you don't speak the language very well. Singing the same words all together helped me feel more a part of the worship service, rather than a slightly flustered confused bystander drowning in French confusion. Music is a universal language that transcends verbs and vocabulary!

There weren't enough hymn books in Relief Society so I took a picture of the song and used that to sing the words.

The third speaker was a British guy who did not speak French at all. This time, the bishop stood next to him at the podium and translated his English into French, sentence by sentence. It was educational hearing real time translation. The last speaker was a French lady and I was so mentally fried by that point that her less-than-clear French almost completely escaped me and I could not stay focused on her words long enough to follow what she was saying. Whew! We sang a closing hymn and shifted to Sunday school. There was an English-speaking Sunday school meeting in another room, but I wanted to be with Jeff and possibly try my hand and more French-learning, so I stayed in the French class. For the record, the ins and outs of the Abrahamic covenant are tricky enough in English, but well-nigh incomprehensible in French. The only person I understood more than a few words from was Jeff, who calmly sat with his legs crossed, raising his hand and making comments like an old hand. 

After Sunday school it was time for me to fly solo and go to Relief Society. I couldn't even remember how to say Relief Society in French by that point, so I wandered out of the main meeting room to see what I could see. Thankfully Relief Society was just across the hall and I boldly took a seat in the middle instead of hiding in the very back. A lady from California sat next to me. She was fluent in French, and her husband was a professor teaching a semester in Paris. At the beginning, all of the visitors had to introduce themselves. There were about five or six of us. Some of the visitors spoke in English, others in French. I boldly decided to attempt an introduction in French: "Je m'apelle Shaina White. Je... (I paused, stuck, and the nice California sister helpfully supplied me with vienne) Je vienne des Etats-Unis, de l'etat de Washington. Mon epouse a servit son mision ici et nous visitons [pour la semaine]. My name is Shaina White. I am from the United States, the state of Washington. My husband served his mission here and we are visiting for the week. I clammed up after "nous visitons" and forgot to say how long we were staying. But it was a rush! The nice California lady next to me said "good job!!" when I finished, and I may have glowed with just a hint of pride/relief. It felt excellent. 

The Relief Society lesson was done back and forth between French and English. The teacher was a recently returned sister missionary who must've served somewhere English speaking, because she translated herself into English every other sentence. It was amazing! People answered questions and made comments in whatever language they were comfortable in--French or English, and the teacher translated as necessary. It was one of those moments where I could step back and see the beauty of it all: here we were, a hodge-podge of women from all over the world, gathered together to talk about the gospel, and we were all just doing our best. It was far from perfect. The translations were shaky. But I could still feel the sisterhood of the gathering. That's all the God asks from us: do your best. We all did just that, and it was fantastic in all of its imperfections. The lesson was about intégrité (integrity). I almost even joined in and made a comment but I chickened out. To be fair, I usually chicken out at commenting during church lessons even when I'm at home and it's all in English. I did find that being guaranteed a translation every other sentence weakened my need to focus on the French part, so I eased up on the brain strain during Relief Society. All in all, however, I felt pretty good about French when church was over.

After church I told Jeff that I really should be practicing French more often because I'm at the point where I need to actually speak it if I'm going to get any better. We proceeded to have an hour-long conversation in French. My brain was utter mush afterwards from the effort.

Since it was Sunday, we decided not to go to a sit-down restaurant and instead grabbed sandwiches and pastries from a boulangerie on our way back from church. In retrospect, we probably could've bought those items on Saturday and saved them for Sunday, but we didn't think of it, although we did have enough food in our hotel room for all other meals on Sunday. We walked to Le Parc des Buttes-Chaumont to enjoy lunch in the sunshine. One of my favorite French words is the word for picnic: pique-nique, pronounced like peek-neek--isn't it cute?

 Pique-nique in Paris!

I liked these woodsy steps in the park.

Jet lag

Jeff and I got home last night after a spending a week in Paris. It was an absolutely wonderful trip. I am still processing the experience, and my brain is fuzzy and travel-tired. Flying to a time zone NINE HOURS ahead and only staying for one week has its various nefarious challenges. During some dark sleepless hours one morning in Paris, I got out of bed and started writing a Shakespeare-inspired faux-ode (fauxd? f'ode?) to my most constant travel companion, the indomitable Mr. Jet Lag.

Jet lag, thy name is...

HUNGER: striking with sudden severity, unexpectedly.

Boredom: 3am is black and boring all alone.

Lonesome: lying awake in the dark for hours, staying quiet for the lucky sleeper.

 

Jealousy: of Jeff's restful, even, deep-sleep breathing.

Tired: why can't I just sleep if I'm this tired?

Creativity: ideas flood my brain but I can't keep up with my own thoughts because I'm too tired.

Confusion: I woke up between 3am and 3:45am like clockwork every night in Paris but two. 3am in Paris is 6pm back home! WHY AM I AWAKE??

Wasteful: I could be OUT and about right now, doing, exploring, and seeing! But it's the middle of the night and the things that are happening in the city right now are not exactly what I want to see. And I'm too tired to move. But awake.

Paranoia: what was that noise? I heard a noise in the wall. Does this hotel have rats? Jeff said that rats are a general problem in Paris. OHMYGOODNESS, what if there's a rat in our wall?? Oh, ok, that was the people upstairs flushing. But RATS! It totally could've been rats. 

Uncertainty: when should I wake Jeff up? We have Things to Do and Places to See after all, and it's 5:59am.

Impatience: wake up already, Husband! 

Desperation: I'm going crazy! I'm going to be SO tired later!

Worthwhile: A WEEK IN PARIS!

[end faux ode]

Clearly my ability to be poetic is significantly muted by jet lag, aka, tiredness. In spite of the fatigue, our week in Paris was absolutely dreamy. We collected gallons of juicy stories, thoughts, discoveries, sights, memories, and pictures! (I have over 200 favorite pictures from our five day stay in Paris.) Our trip simultaneously satiated and stoked my wanderlust. Of course travel has its ups and downs, but the overall picture of our trip was everything I hoped for: 

• Glittering city lights by night, satisfying sights by day. 
• Lots of husband-hand-holding. 
• Fantastic French language practice and progress for my budding linguistic abilities (I can say the guttural "re" sound in the back of my throat nearly 50% of the time now! Baby steps.)
• Copious cobbled streets
• Delicious food [that never crossed my lips (either direction) during my nauseous pregnancies]
• Visits to old favorites and then discovering new gems.
• A change of pace.

I could go on, and I will! Later. Tired now. Write more later.

P.S. There's so much more to Paris than the Eiffel Tower, but man it looks good in pictures.

7 on the 7th

Rose had a birthday this week! She was extra pleased when she found out it would be her "golden birthday", where her age matches her birth date. I must confess that before this year I had never heard of golden birthdays, probably because my own golden birthday occurred when I turned four. But it is a nifty idea! We did the usual birthday interview and cake/candles the night before, presents first thing on the birthday morning, and family birthday dinner and cake/candles that night. It sounds so simple when I condense it all into one sentence, but the night before Rose's birthday I was feeling utterly exhausted from all of the preparations.

We love our Rose-girl so much! She is so vibrant and vivacious that when she went on her traditional birthday shopping trip with Grandma Leslie on Thursday night, our house felt incredibly still and quiet in her absence! Jeff, Jay, and I are naturally quiet, and wild-child Amber usually follows Rose's lead, so without our Rose, we were a silent bunch. 

The birthday interview. Favorite thing to do with Amber: attack Jay. Hah, that's so true (and so loud).

Seven candles

The many faces of Rose.

Sunset the night before Rose's birthday was fiery.

When I asked Rose what she wanted for her birthday, she said "700 pieces of paper, a timer, and for you to surprise me with balloons in my bed." All of her wishes came true, right down to the kitchen timer of her very own.

The way the balloon surprise works is we wait till the birthday kid falls asleep, then blow up a bunch of balloons and toss them into the sleeping kid's bed. This time we did seven balloons, obviously.

The newest seven year old: bright and early, ready for some presents!

Sunrise on the seventh was birthday-rific.

Birthday hat sisters, waiting for me to eat my toast and call Jeff at work so he could view the present-opening proceedings. (he left on a run to work around 6:30am)

We finally got through to Jeff, who was eating breakfast at his desk in his classroom while Rose opened her gifts.

 Since she was born at 7:19am, we made her wait till then to open presents, muahaha.

Her very own timer!

Amber helped with the opening.

Party hats crack me up.

This Boogie Board drawing thingy is so cool! Amber thought it was an iPad. I assured her that it was not.

The birthday haul: a huge stack of 705 pieces of paper: a ream of 500 white paper, plus a 150-pack of colored paper, plus a 25 pack of cloud patterend paper, and two 15-packs of other pretty papers. It was an arithmetic exercise to find the right number! Also: paints, scissors, glitter glue, sparkle markers, regular markers, silly putty, the Boogie Board, and fresh reading material. Artists are easy to find gifts for!

Birthday dinner with some White family members.

Candles! Rose usually has the most blurry birthday pictures because it's so dark in February. Oh well, I still like this action shot!

Birthday dinner menu: mac and cheese, broccoli, carrots, and blue Jell-o. It was quite a lovely rainbow. This birthday was the first time Rose did not request homemade mac for her dinner, but since she wanted the whole family to come over to eat, I compromised with her to have mac with the masses and then the special homemade white pizza with just our small family. Making pizza is time and labor-intensive and making enough to feed this large crew would have wilted me. I had cub scouts later that night too, so I needed some spark of energy to wrangle eight 8-year-old boys after cooking a massive family meal.

Everyone except me, Aunt Steph, and baby Cole. When I left for cub scouts, I asked Jeff to take a cousin birthday picture before everyone left, but he forgot. So this is it! I ate my dinner standing up.

Grama Leslie takes Rose birthday shopping for a new outfit every year. They went the evening after Rose's birthday and found a cute flowery dress and a unicorn shirt. I love this sweet grama tradition, and Rose does too. They went out for dinner at Five Guys after shopping.

And now for my own birthday tradition: a stroll through the birthday kid's childhood:

My little Valentine.

Baby blessing

Lil' ducky at Mt. St. Helens with her wrist rolls.

My smooshy chubby Rosie! Could she be any juicier?

Ice blue eyes, round round cheeks, and rose-red lips.

Those cheeks! That grin! Her hair was/is so straight, her early pigtails were horizontal.

Those eyes: green-gray-blue. And her intensity has only increased over time. 

Static trampoline hair

Age five going on fifteen.

Rose and Jay: the beginning of a marvelous friendship.

Rose and Amber: the start of another dear friendship.

Happy birthday to our brilliant shining Rose!

A boy of action

After complaining almost daily for months about a gross injustice he faces at school (taking away recess time from everyone as a punishment for a few kids being loud at lunch), Jay finally took my advice and wrote an impressive letter to the principal last night:

To Mrs. Hernandez

I am Jay White. I am going to tell you about the Geneva Convention. It is a war crime to punish a group for the actions of a few and this exact thing is happening to me. The paras/lunch teachers make it so third grade has to line up during recess, minimizing the amount of time we have to play because part of third grade is noisy in the cafeteria. This stratagy has not made any changes to the noise level in the cafeteria. Once the lunch teachers said "you don't want to ruin it for everywon." I think kids need to play outside to get energy out. Also making us line up ruins some people's Fuel Up to Play 60's.* Please tell the lunch teachers to stop making us line up.

Yours in education, 

Jay White

*Fuel Up to Play 60 is a program the school is participating in which promotes active healthy kids (eat healthy, be active).

Jay wrote this entire letter all on his own, after numerous conversations spanning the entire school year about the injustices of "lining up." He dreads going to school on days where his class already "owes time" during recess from being noisy the day before. He comes home dragging his feet, announcing in a subdued voice the latest number of "minutes owed." A few months ago when he started complaining about this, I told him to write a letter to the principal. Every time he complained about lining up since then, I have told him to stop complaining and ACT! Try to make a change! The endless circumlocution about unjust punishment was driving me crazy. The injustice of depriving kids of what little recess time they are given completely rubbed all of us the wrong way too. How could any modern educator, para professional or full fledged teacher, not know/understand the value of recess? That's probably my number one problem with schools: the minuscule amount of recess time (30 minutes per day, divided into two segments at our kids' current school). As much as I wanted to storm into the school and demand an explanation and swift action (plus the addition of at least two more recesses for everyone), I held it in, encouraged Jay to take this on, and waited out his initial reluctance for three months.

Yesterday Jay came home and glumly stated "third grade owes the entire recess tomorrow."  That tipped him over the edge at last and he sat down to compose the letter after dinner. A few weeks ago when Jay was explaining "lining up" to Jeff, Jeff mentioned that it reminded him of the Geneva Convention and of course Jay asked every single follow-up question, soaking in the comparison to war crimes with relish. When Jay read us his completed letter, Jeff and I were super impressed with his persuasive writing and use of quality language. We gave him all of the appropriate compliments, and the boy was glowing with pleasure as he carefully folded his letter into an envelope. He hand delivered the letter to the front office on his way into school this morning.

I waited with bated breath all day for Jay to get home from school this afternoon. When he walked in the door, I immediately peppered him with questions about how it went. Jay reported that the principal liked his letter and she left a note on his desk requesting a meeting with him during school. During their meeting, she complimented Jay's writing and ideas and promised to talk with the teachers involved. Jay then casually "gave her some suggestions" as he phrased it, on alternative ways to handle the situation. The boy is fearless! We joked with him that he was leading a recess revolution, to which he replied "I'm more of a peaceful revolutionary."  

Opposite

Well February is off to a roaring start. I feel the need to mention that today was about as opposite to the rainbows and sparkles of my Monday and Tuesday as possible. It all started at 5am with a barfing child and didn't improve much afterwards. I'm exhausted and I don't have any pictures to share, just this lackluster description of my tough day. Oh, life and all of your ups and downs, did you have to chew me up, spit me out, and leave me in a trampled over-emotional heap tonight?

Nothing earth-shattering or even out of the ordinary (bad or good) happened today. I'm not trying to be cryptic; I'm just sleep deprived from various wee-hour inconveniences spreading me thin throughout the week and too worn out to go into detail. After writing all of those happy bouncy hopeful words here earlier this week it seemed dishonest not to share that my Thursday was about as Thursdayish as it could possibly be, right down to the chilly gray drizzle outside. The trenches are extra muddy tonight.

Tomorrow is another day. In the wise words of Rubeus Hagrid, "what's going to happen is going to happen, and we'll meet it when it comes."

One of the things I like about reading on a Kindle is all of the lines I highlight are stored in a file. I can open that file on my Kindle and read all of the best parts of my favorite books one quote after another. I just spent an hour browsing my past book quote highlights, and it was like visiting dear friends, each one with a jewel of wit or wisdom to impart. Tonigh those words are cheering me up in all their applicable variety:

"I shall be a vestibule of unhampered sanity." --Marissa Meyer, Winter

"Did you ever hear of such a discouraging series of events? It isn't the big troubles in life that require character. Anyone can rise to a crisis and face crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh--I really think that requires SPIRIT." --Jean Webster, Daddy-Long-Legs

"I like winter to be winter with snow instead of rain." --Jean Webster, Daddy-Long-Legs

"Love was the thing that kept a person going past exhaustion, beyond reason, after hope was at its end." --Laurie R. King, The Murder of Mary Russell

"There's no shame in being desperate where chocolate is concerned." --B. B. Green, Backtrack

"This was the problem of being tall myself. I always judged others by their height." --Nichole Van, Gladly Beyond

"Shall we make a new rule of life...always try to be a little kinder than is necessary? ...we carry with us, as human beings, not just the capacity to be kind, but the very choice of kindness." --R. J. Palacio, Wonder

"Right now I'd like all of my troubles to stand in front of me in a straight line, and one by one I'd give each a black eye." --Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl

"They were a threat to the furniture, but it was cheerful to hear them laugh." --MaryAnn Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

"The possibilities seemed endless, which made it all the more exciting, since possibilities are so much more thrilling than certainties--or so I've always thought." --Alan Bradley, The Grave's a Fine and Private Place

"'We're not dead,' I say. No one dead feels this tired." --Ally Condie, Crossed