A young mother working in a fabric store in modern day New York seeks a particular design she saw years ago. A nurse on Ellis Island helps a widowed immigrant back to health. These two characters lives come together over time to tell stories of great loss and how we react to it and eventually move on.
Some quotes:
"Kindness is always motivated by something nobler than just a desire to be kind. I had a wounded heart. Like his. That is what I had."
"I want to be able to remember and have it not hurt. I think it's possible to remember someone you loved and lost and feel blessed that you knew them, even for just a short time, without it hurting."
"The person who completes your life is not so much the person who shares all the years of your existence, but rather the person who made you life worth living, not matter how long or short a time you were given to spend with them."
"...a strange but welcome ache for the loss of my island fell over me: the ache of losing something that is comfortable only because it is familiar, not dear."
"Perhaps you are thinking, as I once did, that love is too precarious to want to lavish it again on another. I want you to know that love is not a person. It is not of this earth at all. It wasn't until now that I realized I had mistakenly come to believe that love came from a place inside me and therefore I had to protect that place. It comes from heaven. It is given to us not to hold on to or hide from but to give away."
Published: 2014 Read: November 2017 Genre: Fiction
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