#1

Finished an Elizabeth Berg novel to start the new year ~ It is certainly not my favorite Berg novel, but it had some of her quotable moments.  #1 for 2013 is once upon a time, there was you.  It is the story of a divorced couple & their only daughter who gets kidnapped...and saved in the span of three chapters {it was a little hard to believe} and then she gets married ~ all before coming home.  {guess what, Mom & Dad.  I thought I was going to die, but it's ok, I'm married now.}
It was more of a story of learning who you are and how to embrace the past instead of letting it swallow you.

Quotes:
p 15 ~ good word

~ a Yiddish word meaning having a full, rounded figure; plump
p 39 ~ Or he can go back to the ease of solitude.  It's really not so bad, being alone, never worrying about what has to done for, or with, or in the interest of another.  It's like you let your mind stay in its pajamas all day.
p 58 ~ People are stupid.  Why are they so stupid?  There is an algorithm for the way humans were designed; love and be loved.  Follow it and you're happy.  Fight against it and you're not.  It's so simple, it's hard to understand.
p 59 ~ Sometimes saying it makes it so.
p 60 ~ You show up on your first date with your best shoew on, hoping to get to a place where you keep your shoes off, is what he thinks.

p 276~ But I feel like you're all the time digging in the tomato bin, saying, 'Where are the apple?'
p 104 ~ Mom, it sounds like mothballs smell!
p 110 ~ So much can be done to a life with one impulsive decision.
p 117 ~ ...people stay irrevocably themselves (truth be told, Irene would still like to be a cowgirl, never mind that the skills required are not her own), but mostly the only thing one can rely on is unreliability.
p 161 ~ But who can know their own children, really?  After a certain age, their longings and deepest feelings are shared with someone else.
p 257 ~ Sometimes we make choices in our lives.  Sometimes our lives make choices for us.  I wish for you some harmony in spirit.
p 271 ~ And I just think that we need to collect these joy berries wherever we find them and put them in our big yellow buckets.

fl: When John Marsh was a young boy, he used to watch his mother getting ready to go out for the evening.  ll: She goes for her keys, then heads out the door to join them.