Mary E. Pearson Quotes

The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it.

How can you be sure?" "I'm a doctor, Jenna. And a scientist." "Does that make you an authority on everything? What about a soul, Father? When you were so busy implanting all your neural chips, did you think about that? Did you snip my soul from my old body, too? Where did you put it? Show me! Where? Where in all this groundbreaking technology did you insert my soul?

I don't want five hundred billion neural chips. I want guts.

Sometimes there's not a better way. Sometimes there's only the hard way.

... Change doesn't happen overnight-it's molded by people who don't give up

Some things aren't meant to be known. Only believed.

Pieces. Isn't that what all of life is anyway? Shards. Bits. Moments. Am I less because I have fewer, or do the few I have mean more?

What I think is all I have left. My mind is the only thing that makes me different from a fancy toaster. What we think does matter-it's all we truly have.

Percentages! Those are for economists, polls, and politicians. Percentages can't define your identity.

My memory is coming back. It is curious how it comes. Each day, a rush of pieces, loosely connected, unimportant bits, snake through me. They click, click, click into my brain, like links being snapped together. And then they are done. A small chain of memories that fill in one tiny part of my life. They come out of nowhere, and most are not important.

When you are perfect, is there anywhere else to go?

The dictionary says my identity should be all about being separate or distinct, and yet it feels like it is so wrapped up in others.

I wonder at the weight of a Sparrow.

There are many words and definitions I have never lost. But some I am only just beginning to truly understand.

Are the details of our lives who we are, or is it owning those details that makes the difference?

I decide that sometimes definitions are wrong. Even if they're written in a dictionary. Identities aren't always separate and distinct. Sometimes they ARE wrapped up with others. Sometimes, for a few minutes, maybe they can even be shared. And if I am ever fortunate enough to return to Mr. Bender's garden, I wonder if the birds will see that piece of him that is wrapped up in me.

You've always been two people. The Jenna who wants to please and the Jenna who secretly resents in. They won't break, you know. Your parents never thought you were perfect. You did.

Where we are going, I don't know. It doesn't seem to be the place that is important but the steps in between.

Maybe staying on the surface keeps her from returning to a place where she can't breathe.

It's the unknown that I fear, the bites of memories that still have no connections.

Faith and science, I have learned, are two sides of the same coin, separated by an expanse so small, but wide enough that one side can't see the other. They don't know they are connected.

Father says it will come in time. “Time heals,” he says. I don’t tell him that I don’t know what time is.

I think that maybe forgiveness is like change - it comes in small steps. (256)

One small changed family doesn't calculate into a world that has been spinning for a billion years. But one small change makes the world spin differently in a billion ways for one family.

Maybe the impossible is possible when you take everything else away.