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Book Title Quotes

“I never wanted to forget where I'd been and what I'd learned along the way. I used Meyer lemons and good French butter. I zested and stirred and thought of my mom as I worked. And to every hot, bubbling pan of lemon pie filling, I added a single lemon drop. As I watched it melt into the sugar and lemon juice mixture, I reminded myself of the truth I now knew. That you don't need magic to change your life. You just need to follow your bliss as best you can. If you follow the light, no matter how dark the circumstances, things will come out right in the end. That's the true recipe for joy in this life. That's the true magic of lemon drop pie.”

“Through a break in the willows, if the fog isn't too heavy, you can see the edge of what everyone around here calls the Waters, where a sort of island rises up, accessible by a bridge three planks wide, strung between oil barrels floating on the watery muck. There, under the branches of sycamores, oaks, and hackberries, the green-stained Rose Cottage sinks on the two nearest corners so that it appears to be squatting above the bridge, preparing to pitch itself into the muck. Beyond the cottage, the trees give way to a mosquito-infested no-man's-land of tussocks, marshes, shallows, hummocks, pools, streams, and springs a half mile wide between solid ground and the Old Woman River. This is where Herself harvested wild rice, cattails, staghorn sumac, and a thousand other plants.”

“And now that it's reached 1660 degrees, I can salt glaze it." "What's that?" Aiden held up the bowl. "Watch." He pinched a small amount of salt between his fingers and deposited it through a hole at the top of the kiln. There were actually many holes along the rim, tiny rectangular openings, and Aiden moved from one to the next, sprinkling fingerfuls of salt through them. "Salt does amazing things to clay," he said. "The crystals actually explode when they hit the heat, and then turn into a vapor. It's the vapor that transforms the look of the clay." "How?" I asked. "What's it do?" "It makes the clay glossy, and the surface gets this sort of orange-peel texture. But the really cool thing about salt glazing is that no two pieces ever look the same. Each one is completely unique, depending on how much or how little salt you use.”

“Great-grandma Elisa Ramires was a promising cook at an inn. The job was her only opportunity to raise Grandma on her own, so she made herself famous with a buttery, delicately savory fubá cake recipe. Dona Elizabete Molina had been at the inn longer than Great-grandma, and she was also famous for her own recipe. Milk pudding. It was said to be so smooth it slid on your tongue. The two were often at odds. They each wanted to prove to the neighborhood who was the best cook in town, and the opportunity came about with a cooking contest. The night before the contest, Great-grandma and Dona Elizabete were busy preparing their entry dishes and tending to the many guests at the inn. It was a busy night, with many tourists in town for Carnival. Nerves frazzled, shoulder to shoulder, and vying for space in the small kitchen, the story goes that the cooks accidentally tripped each other and sent their cake and pudding flying off the trays. Miraculously, the layers stacked up. Dona Elizabete's milk pudding landed atop Great-grandma's fubá cake. Maybe Dona Elizabete held the tray at the right angle until the last second and the pudding had enough surface tension to just slide off the right way without breaking. Maybe Great-grandma's cake was firm enough to hold the delicate layer of pudding atop. Whatever the case, they tried this new, accidental two-layered cake and realized that their recipes complemented each other beautifully. When they passed samples around to the guests, their reaction was proof that they'd produced perfection. No one remembers if they still entered the contest. Because from that moment on, the only thing everyone could talk about was their new recipe, the one they called "Salt and Sugar". One layer fubá cake, one layer pudding.”

“When I was nineteen years old, I discovered a collection of books in the Harvard library written by Jacob Boehme. Do you know of him?" Naturally she knew of him. She had her own copies of these works in the White Acre library. She had read Boehme, though she never admired him. Jacob Boehme was a sixteenth-century cobbler from Germany who had mystical visions about plants. Many people considered him an early botanist. Alma's mother, on the other hand, had considered him a cesspool of residual medieval superstition. So there was considerable conflict of opinion surrounding Jacob Boehme. The old cobbler had believed in something he called "the signature of all things"- namely, that God had hidden clues for humanity's betterment inside the design of every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth. All the natural world was a divine code, Boehme claimed, containing proof of our Creator's love. That is why so many medicinal plants resembled the diseases they were meant to cure, or the organs they were able to treat. Basil, with its liver-shaped leaves, is the obvious ministration for ailments of the liver. The celandine herb, which produces a yellow sap, can be used to treat the yellow discoloration brought on by jaundice. Walnuts, shaped like brains, are helpful for headaches. Coltsfoot, which grows near cold streams, can cure the coughs and chills brought on by immersion in ice water. 'Polygonum,' with its spattering of blood-red markings on the leaves, cures bleeding wounds of the flesh.”

“We know now that all the people of Polynesia carry taro root and coconut palm and breadfruit with them when they settle a new island, but they themselves will tell you that the gods planted these things here. Some of their stories are quite fabulous. They say that the breadfruit tree was crafted by the gods to resemble a human body, as a clue to humans, you see- to tell us that the tree is useful. They say that this is why the leaves of the breadfruit resemble hands- to show humans that they should reach toward this tree and find sustenance there. In fact, the Tahitians say that 'all' the useful plants on this island resemble parts of the human body, as a message from the gods, you see. This is why coconut oil, which is helpful for headaches, comes from the coconut, which looks like a head. 'Mape' chestnuts are said to be good for kidney ailments, for they resemble kidneys themselves, or so I am told. The bright red sap of the 'fei' plant is meant to be useful for blood ailments." "The signature of all things," Alma murmured.”

“There once was a girl of the Moth Folk, dark-winged, strong, and fearless. Her eyes were like the starlit sky; her footfall soft as shadow. And although she was lovely, love had no place in her heart, for hers was the tribe of the Moth King, who had waged a war on love, for ever and ever. But love, like all forbidden things, was fascinating to her. Every night of the clear full moon, she would go to the Moonlight Market and watch the traders sell their wares: printed books of every kind; pomegranates of the south; wines from the islands; gems from the north; flowers that bloomed only once in their lives. But she only had eyes for the sellers of charms and glamours. Here, there were spells for a broken heart, or to spin dead leaves into gold, or to rekindle a memory, or to summon the western wind. Most of all, there were love spells: tiny bottles of colored glass with stoppers worked in silver filled with potions made from the heart of a rose, or the tail fin of a mermaid. Here were glamours to melt a lover's heart: candles of every color; tokens of remembrance; silk-bound books of poetry. But among all the love-knots and bonbons and pressed flowers and handkerchiefs, the Moth girl never truly saw the nature of her enemy, for it seemed to her that Love was weak, and simpering, and faithless. She told herself she was too strong to fall for its blandishments. Until one day, at the Market, she saw a boy with a glamorie-glass in his hand, standing by a display of books, and stories, and legends, and memories.”

“There was one my dad told me, setting down the book, since he knew the story by heart, about a fairy queen who lived in the center of the marsh. She was both beautiful and terrible, angry at times and kind at others, and rarely seen by mortals. Mostly she took the form of a great blue heron, surveying her kingdom and all the creatures in it. She disdained most humans, except those she helped make the passage into the next world. But if a living person had a sincere wish and she deemed it noble, she would rise up out of the swamp in her true form, with her Spanish-moss hair and her eyes like the sharpest sunbeams, and she would ask the human to perform a nearly impossible task. If they did, she would grant the wish.”

“It shouldn't be here. This sedge grass is decorative bullshit he imported from Northern Asia. The lab spent two years modifying it to slot into our ecosystem, all so that the mountain would literally smell of honey. Terra di latte e miele, she said, mockingly. Thank god my father went into business, not poetry. He's far too much of a romantic. I laughed, incredulous at this portrait of my stiff employer, and Aida reddened. It is romantic, if you think about it. He planted the grass for my mother. She's one of those Catholic Koreans, painfully devout. You know. The promised land, Canaan, found after forty years of wandering the desert. The land of milk and honey.”

“I've asked you so many Golub words over the years." She looked up at him. Her eyes glistened. "But what's the Golub word for 'love'?" "Love," he repeated. "Th-there's more than one word for love. There's friendship love---silan. Gratitude love---baya. Nostalgic love---ruman. There's... there are forty words for love." "What if, hypothetically, you feel all those ways about someone?" "Hypothetically?" "No." She held his gaze. "Actually not hypothetically at all." Looking into her eyes, Raf found himself unable to speak. "I... I started working on that mural randomly. I didn't even plan it out properly. What did it matter? Not like anyone's given a crap about that mural since the storm came through. And what did I end up creating? The dolphins we swam with," she said. "The sandcastles we made together. Everything on there... Do you see it, Raf?" There was Main Street---the movie theater. Tilted Tales, where they sat for hours on end reading comics. The entire street was there, but it was both of these locations that shone with a sheen of glitter. He took it all in. "It's us," he said slowly. "You painted our places. Our favorite memories." "I love you, Raf." Her voice quivered. "Silan---the friendship one. Baya, the gratitude one. Ruman. Nostalgia for what we were. All of it. I love you in all the ways I know.”

“There's satisfaction in knowing something so well-- and knowing someone so well. Like a recipe by heart, every step, every ingredient, every taste. So familiar that it feels a part of her, as soon as her fingers dip into flour or rich skin. Each knead like an argument, each release like a kiss, until something has been made out of practically nothing, a string of separate ingredients mixed together like a courtship until they make one whole, grown stronger by each trial, each compression under two palms.”