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“Do you do that with all your friends?"
"What's that?"
"Prepare them for the worst."
She nodded. "If the worst is a possibility, then you keep it on the table. Don't hide from it. Don't run. It can happen. And if and when it does, you need to have thought about it ahead of time. That way you're not crushed when your worst thought becomes reality.”
― Charles Martin, The Mountain Between Us

“... Broken people just need piecing back together.
For so long I'd carried the pieces of me. Every now and then I'd drop one like a breadcrumb. So I could find my way home. Then Ashley came along and gathered the pieces and somewhere between 11,000 fee and sea level, the picture began taking shape. Dim at first, then clearer. Not yet clear. But these things take time.
Maybe each of us was once a complete whole. A clear picture. A single piece. Then something happened to crack and shatter us. Leaving us disconnected, torn and splintered. Some of us lie in a hundred pieces. Some ten thousand. Some are edged with sharp contrast. Some dim shades of gray. Some find they are missing pieces. Some find they have too many. In any case, we are left shaking our heads. It can't be done.
Then someone comes along who mends a tattered edge, or returns a lost piece. The process is tedious, painful, and there are no shortcuts. Anything that promises to be one is not.
But somehow, as we walk from the crash site - away from he wreckage - whole sections start taking shape, something vague we see out of the corner of our eye. For a second, we stop shaking our heads. We wonder. Maybe...just maybe.
It's risky for both of us. You must hope in an image you can't see, and I must trust you with me.
That's the piecing.”
― Charles Martin, The Mountain Between Us

“It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Once a heart breaks…it doesn’t just grow back. It’s not a lizard’s tail. It’s more like a huge stained glass that shattered into a million pieces, and it’s not going back together. Least not the way it was. You can mush it all into one piece, but that doesn’t make it a window. That makes it a pile of broken colored glass. Shattered hearts don’t mend and they don’t heal. They just don’t work that way.”
― Charles Martin, The Mountain Between Us