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Quote by Elke Heinrich

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Elke Heinrich

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“The face that looked back at me from this mirror was also round and rosy, framed at the top by a precise line of straight-cut bangs. My eyes were wide and dark, unshadowed by disappointment or compassion. My teeth were new and awkward, the two front ones serrated at the bottom like a bread knife, but I was too young to try to smile with my lips closed or laugh behind my hand. I never thought my face would change. I thought my childhood would go one forever. Instead, I grew out my bangs and grew up.”

Growing Up
Book:Be with Me Always: Essays
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“She had tried when she turned sixteen to think of herself as a woman, like Jane Eyre or Elizabeth Bennet or the multitudes of heroines who lived in her books, but in her head she wasn't there. They were all older than her, and had all, even Jane, seen more of life. And yet she was too old to be Sara Crewe or Alice or Wendy Darling either. She was a liminal person, trapped between a world she'd grown out of and another that wouldn't let her in. It was one reason why she wanted to leave the island so badly--- the hope that leaving the place she'd grown up would help her leave her childhood behind. Not forever, not yet. But for a visit, to see what it was like.”

Growing UpHeroinesIndependent Thinking
Book:The Magician’s Daughter
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“The Florida side of my family is huge. People married young. Were Fruitful. Multiplied. As a kid a family fish fry might see 50 gather in someone's First District yard. A great-uncle frying mullet. Adults in the shade as kids played. Games of tag with complex rules. Jumping Live Oak roots. Flinging Chinaberries. You'd limp to the shade bruised and breathless. Hear a story about a cousin caught stealing hogs. Quickly get sent away – "Go play! This is Grown People Business!" We'd head back out. Climb trees. Make palm frond swords. Years passed. I grew up and found that most of those relatives were gone. I had missed the Grown People Business.”

FamilyGrowing UpRegret
Book:Some Books Are Not For Sale
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“I had always been in love with someone. It was the only thing that made it feasible to live that way, getting up at six and remaining conscious until late at night. It was like religion for medieval people. It gave you energy to face injustice, powerlessness, and drudgery. The guys I was in love with always ignored me, but were never unkind. There was something abstract and gentle about the feeling of being ignored, a feeling of being spared, an impossibility of anything happening, which was consonant with my understanding of love. In theory, of course, I knew love could be reciprocated. It was something that happened, often, to other people. But I was unlike other people in so many ways.”

LoveRomanceReligionGrowing UpHigh SchoolCoping
Book:Either/or
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