“Mom always told me there are two kinds of love in this world: the steady breeze, and the hurricane.”
―
Melody Grace,
Unbroken
“I always want you, Jules. Even when I hated you, even when I wished I’d never see your face again, I still lost my mind thinking all the things I’d do to you, if you came back.” His voice breaks. When he speaks again, it’s with a rough, ragged tone, like he’s forcing the words out. “I’ll always want you, Juliet. It’ll be the fucking death of me, but I won’t ever stop.” ― Melody Grace, Unbroken
“You’re mine,” he says again fiercely. “Not his, not anyone else’s. You can try and pretend you don’t feel it, but you do. You’ll always be mine.” ― Melody Grace, Unbroken
“Looking back, I wonder if mom saw it in my eyes: the storm clouds gathering, the dry crackle of electricity in the air. But it was already too late. No warning sirens were going to save me. I guess you never really know the danger, not until you’re the one left, huddled on the ground, surrounded by the pieces of your broken heart.” ― Melody Grace, Unbroken
“My mom always said, there are two kinds of love in this world: the steady breeze, and the hurricane.The steady breeze is slow and patient. It fills the sails of the boats in the harbor, and lifts laundry on the line. It cools you on a hot summer’s day; brings the leaves of fall, like clockwork every year. You can count on a breeze, steady and sure and true.But there’s nothing steady about a hurricane. It rips through town, reckless, sending the ocean foaming up the shore, felling trees and power lines and anyone dumb or fucked-up enough to stand in its path. Sure, it’s a thrill like nothing you’ve ever known: your pulse kicks, your body calls to it, like a spirit possessed. It’s wild and breathless and all-consuming.But what comes next?“You see a hurricane coming, you run.” My mom told me, the summer I turned eighteen. “You shut the doors, and you bar the windows. Because come morning, there’ll be nothing but the wreckage left behind.”Emerson Ray was my hurricane.Looking back, I wonder if mom saw it in my eyes: the storm clouds gathering, the dry crackle of electricity in the air. But it was already too late. No warning sirens were going to save me. I guess you never really know the danger, not until you’re the one left, huddled on the ground, surrounded by the pieces of your broken heart.It’s been four years now since that summer. Since Emerson. It took everything I had to pull myself back together, to crawl out of the empty wreckage of my life and build something new in its place. This time, I made it storm-proof. Strong. I barred shutters over my heart, and found myself a steady breeze to love. I swore, nothing would ever destroy me like that summer again.I was wrong.That’s the thing about hurricanes. Once the storm touches down, all you can do is pray.” ― Melody Grace, Unbroken
“You go out into your world, and try and find the things that will be useful to you. Your weapons. Your tools. Your charms. You find a record, or a poem, or a picture of a girl that you pin to the wall and go, "Her. I'll try and be her. I'll try and be her - but here." You observe the way others walk, and talk, and you steal little bits of them - you collage yourself out of whatever you can get your hands on. You are like the robot Johnny 5 in Short Circuit, crying, "More input! More input for Johnny 5! as you rifle through books and watch films and sit in front of the television, trying to guess which of these things that you are watching - Alexis Carrington Colby walking down a marble staircase; Anne of Green Gables holding her shoddy suitcase; Cathy wailing on the moors; Courtney Love wailing in her petticoat; Dorothy Parker gunning people down; Grace Jones singing "Slave to the Rhythm" - you will need when you get out there. What will be useful. What will be, eventually, you? And you will be quite on your own when you do all this. There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager slowly urging you toward the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone. And some versions of you will end in dismal failure - many prototypes won't even get out the front door, as you suddenly realize that no, you can't style-out an all-in-one gold bodysuit and a massive attitude problem in Wolverhampton. Others will achieve temporary success - hitting new land-speed records, and amazing all around you, and then suddenly, unexpectedly exploding, like the Bluebird on Coniston Water. But one day you'll find a version of you that will get you kissed, or befriended, or inspired, and you will make your notes accordingly, staying up all night to hone and improvise upon a tiny snatch of melody that worked. Until - slowly, slowly - you make a viable version of you, one you can hum every day. You'll find the tiny, right piece of grit you can pearl around, until nature kicks in, and your shell will just quietly fill with magic, even while you're busy doing other things. What your nature began, nature will take over, and start completing, until you stop having to think about who you'll be entirely - as you're too busy doing, now. And ten years will pass without you even noticing. And later, over a glass of wine - because you drink wine now, because you are grown - you will marvel over what you did. Marvel that, at the time, you kept so many secrets. Tried to keep the secret of yourself. Tried to metamorphose in the dark. The loud, drunken, fucking, eyeliner-smeared, laughing, cutting, panicking, unbearably present secret of yourself. When really you were about as secret as the moon. And as luminous, under all those clothes.” ― Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl
“You know what ‘fine’ stands for, don’t you?” When Jane didn’t respond, Grace answered for her. “It stands for Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional.” ― Ryan Winfield, Jane's Melody
“With my guitar, I could write my own stories, my own poems, and my own destiny. No one could take away the feelings, the emotions or the truth of my notes. They could hide secrets and provoke images of words that never should be whispered. I could compose the melody of my aching heart and write into it my own happily ever after since no one seemed to think after all my suffering I deserved one. That's okay, I would make my own.” ― Christine Zolendz, Saving Grace
“Because I realize now, that's the way it works. That if you're lucky, you might get to fall in love so hard and so deep, that it changes you. That love seeps its way into every atom and molecule in your whole being, so that even if it's over, or the two of you are forced apart, you'll always carry the imprint of their soul with you, steady as a heartbeat. Forever....” ― Melody Grace, Unbroken
“Emerson lifts his head. His eyes are two dark pools of desire, a clouded night’s sky. He catches his breath a moment, unsteady, and then drops a kiss on my lips. Sweet. Almost tender. I barely have time to take it in before he grabs my shoulder and spins me around, pushing me so my bare chest is slammed up into the wall, my cheek pressed against the cold concrete. I gasp, my heart skipping with the thrill. I can feel him up against me, a solid wall of muscle trapping me in place, the hard ridge of him pressed against the small of my back. I can’t move, or see the expression on his face, only hear the hoarse groan Emerson sounds as he twists a handful of my hair and yanks it to one side, kissing a searing trail along the curve of my neck.I whimper, bound and powerless against him, and oh God, loving every minute of it.” ― Melody Grace, Unbroken
“She had no need in her heart for either book or magazine. She had her own way of escape, her own passage into contentment: her rosary. That string of white beads, the tiny links worn in a dozen places and held together by strands of white thread which in turn broke regularly, was, bead for bead, her quiet flight out of the world. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. And Maria began to climb. Bead for bead, life and living fell away. Hail Mary, Hail Mary. Dream without sleep encompassed her. Passion without flesh lulled her. Love without death crooned the melody of belief. She was away: she was free; she was no longer Maria, American or Italian, poor or rich, with or without electric washing machines and vacuum cleaners; here was the land of all-possessing. Hail Mary, Hail Mary, over and over, a thousand and a hundred thousand times, prayer upon prayer, the sleep of the body, the escape of the mind, the death of memory, the slipping away of pain, the deep silent reverie of belief. Hail Mary and Hail Mary. It was for this that she lived.” ― John Fante, Wait Until Spring, Bandini
“Agenda is bad when it usurps the beauty. Christian art should strive for a marriage of the two, just as Christ is described as being “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Truth without beauty can be a weapon; beauty without truth can be spineless. The two together are like lyric and melody. This is not to say that beauty itself isn’t a kind of truth, nor that truth itself isn’t beautiful. It’ll take a better philosopher than me to parse all that out. (I commend to you authors like Steve Guthrie and Jeremy Begbie if you want to swim in those deep but lovely waters.)” ― Andrew Peterson, Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making
“I cant believe you named your boat after me.... " Emerson coughs. "Well i figured it suited her" He gives me a devilish grin. "She was a stubborn bitch, but once i got my hands on her, she fell into line” ― Melody Grace, Unbroken
“QUALITIESThere is a sun-star rising outside form.I am lost in that other. It's sweet notto look at two worlds, to melt in meaningas honey melts in milk. No one tires of following the soul. I don't recall now whathappens on the manifest plane. I strollwith those I have always wanted to know,fresh and graceful as a water lily, or a rose.The body is a boat; I am waves swaying against it. Whenever it anchors somewhere, I smashit loose, or smash it to pieces. If I getlazy and cold, flames come from my ocean and surround me. I laugh inside them like gold purifying itself. A certain melody makesthe snake put his head down on a line in the dirt....Here is my head, brother: Whatnext! Weary of form, I come into qualities.Each says, "I am a blue-green sea. Diveinto me!" I am Alexander at the outermostextension of empire, turning all my armiesin toward the meaning of armies, Shams.” ― Rumi, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems
“I don't want to call her a shallow bitch, but she earns it.” ― Melody Grace, Unbroken
“This is my favorite place in the world" Emerson's voice is low, thick with desire. "Right here. In you” ― Melody Grace, Unbroken
“Almost I feel the pulsebeat of the ages, Now swift, now slow, beneath my fingertips.The heartthrobs of the prophets and the sagesBeat through these bindings; and my quick hand slipsOld books from dusty shelves, in eager seekingFor truths the flaming tongues of the ancients tell;For the words of wisdom that they still are speakingAs clearly as an echoing silver bell.Here is the melody that lies foreverAt the deep heart of living; here we keepThe accurate recorded discs that neverCan be quite silenced, though their makers sleepThe still deep sleep, so long as a seeker findsThe indelible imprint of their moving minds.” ― Grace Noll Crowell
“O music! A melody occurs to you; you sing it silently, inwardly only; you steep your being in it; it takes possession of all your strength and emotions, and during the time it lives in you, it effaces all that is fortuitous, evil, coarse, and sad in you; it brings the world into harmony with you, it makes burdens light and gives wings to depressed spirits. The melody of a folk song can do that. And first of all harmony! For each harmonious chord of pure-toned notes - those of church bells, for example - fills the spirit with grace and delight, a feeling that is intensified by every additional note; and at times this can enchant the heart and make it tremble with bliss as no other sensual pleasure can.” ― Hermann Hesse, Gertrude
“Yes You Are!Like the Blossoming rose,Like the Rays of hope.Like a deer in the forest,Like an athlete full of zest.Like a lamp in temple,Like the life feeling ample.Like the feel of the dawn,Like the grace of the swan.Like the melody of sitar,Like the rage of guitar.Like a group of angels in the sky,Like the pot that makes you high.Like the peacock's dance,Like she is the romance.Like the silent talk,Like the wine from Medoc.Like the colors of life,Like the music from the fife.Like the calmness of the cold windLike the beauty of the hind.” ― Ameya Agrawal, A Leap Within
“I always want you, Jules. Even when I hated you, even when I wished I’d never see your face again, I still lost my mind thinking all the things I’d do to you, if you came back.” His voice breaks. When he speaks again, it’s with a rough, ragged tone, like he’s forcing the words out. “I’ll always want you, Juliet. It’ll be the fucking death of me, but I won’t ever stop.” ― Melody Grace, Unbroken
“You’re mine,” he says again fiercely. “Not his, not anyone else’s. You can try and pretend you don’t feel it, but you do. You’ll always be mine.” ― Melody Grace, Unbroken
“Looking back, I wonder if mom saw it in my eyes: the storm clouds gathering, the dry crackle of electricity in the air. But it was already too late. No warning sirens were going to save me. I guess you never really know the danger, not until you’re the one left, huddled on the ground, surrounded by the pieces of your broken heart.” ― Melody Grace, Unbroken
“My mom always said, there are two kinds of love in this world: the steady breeze, and the hurricane.The steady breeze is slow and patient. It fills the sails of the boats in the harbor, and lifts laundry on the line. It cools you on a hot summer’s day; brings the leaves of fall, like clockwork every year. You can count on a breeze, steady and sure and true.But there’s nothing steady about a hurricane. It rips through town, reckless, sending the ocean foaming up the shore, felling trees and power lines and anyone dumb or fucked-up enough to stand in its path. Sure, it’s a thrill like nothing you’ve ever known: your pulse kicks, your body calls to it, like a spirit possessed. It’s wild and breathless and all-consuming.But what comes next?“You see a hurricane coming, you run.” My mom told me, the summer I turned eighteen. “You shut the doors, and you bar the windows. Because come morning, there’ll be nothing but the wreckage left behind.”Emerson Ray was my hurricane.Looking back, I wonder if mom saw it in my eyes: the storm clouds gathering, the dry crackle of electricity in the air. But it was already too late. No warning sirens were going to save me. I guess you never really know the danger, not until you’re the one left, huddled on the ground, surrounded by the pieces of your broken heart.It’s been four years now since that summer. Since Emerson. It took everything I had to pull myself back together, to crawl out of the empty wreckage of my life and build something new in its place. This time, I made it storm-proof. Strong. I barred shutters over my heart, and found myself a steady breeze to love. I swore, nothing would ever destroy me like that summer again.I was wrong.That’s the thing about hurricanes. Once the storm touches down, all you can do is pray.” ― Melody Grace, Unbroken
“You go out into your world, and try and find the things that will be useful to you. Your weapons. Your tools. Your charms. You find a record, or a poem, or a picture of a girl that you pin to the wall and go, "Her. I'll try and be her. I'll try and be her - but here." You observe the way others walk, and talk, and you steal little bits of them - you collage yourself out of whatever you can get your hands on. You are like the robot Johnny 5 in Short Circuit, crying, "More input! More input for Johnny 5! as you rifle through books and watch films and sit in front of the television, trying to guess which of these things that you are watching - Alexis Carrington Colby walking down a marble staircase; Anne of Green Gables holding her shoddy suitcase; Cathy wailing on the moors; Courtney Love wailing in her petticoat; Dorothy Parker gunning people down; Grace Jones singing "Slave to the Rhythm" - you will need when you get out there. What will be useful. What will be, eventually, you? And you will be quite on your own when you do all this. There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager slowly urging you toward the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone. And some versions of you will end in dismal failure - many prototypes won't even get out the front door, as you suddenly realize that no, you can't style-out an all-in-one gold bodysuit and a massive attitude problem in Wolverhampton. Others will achieve temporary success - hitting new land-speed records, and amazing all around you, and then suddenly, unexpectedly exploding, like the Bluebird on Coniston Water. But one day you'll find a version of you that will get you kissed, or befriended, or inspired, and you will make your notes accordingly, staying up all night to hone and improvise upon a tiny snatch of melody that worked. Until - slowly, slowly - you make a viable version of you, one you can hum every day. You'll find the tiny, right piece of grit you can pearl around, until nature kicks in, and your shell will just quietly fill with magic, even while you're busy doing other things. What your nature began, nature will take over, and start completing, until you stop having to think about who you'll be entirely - as you're too busy doing, now. And ten years will pass without you even noticing. And later, over a glass of wine - because you drink wine now, because you are grown - you will marvel over what you did. Marvel that, at the time, you kept so many secrets. Tried to keep the secret of yourself. Tried to metamorphose in the dark. The loud, drunken, fucking, eyeliner-smeared, laughing, cutting, panicking, unbearably present secret of yourself. When really you were about as secret as the moon. And as luminous, under all those clothes.” ― Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl
“You know what ‘fine’ stands for, don’t you?” When Jane didn’t respond, Grace answered for her. “It stands for Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional.” ― Ryan Winfield, Jane's Melody
“With my guitar, I could write my own stories, my own poems, and my own destiny. No one could take away the feelings, the emotions or the truth of my notes. They could hide secrets and provoke images of words that never should be whispered. I could compose the melody of my aching heart and write into it my own happily ever after since no one seemed to think after all my suffering I deserved one. That's okay, I would make my own.” ― Christine Zolendz, Saving Grace
“Because I realize now, that's the way it works. That if you're lucky, you might get to fall in love so hard and so deep, that it changes you. That love seeps its way into every atom and molecule in your whole being, so that even if it's over, or the two of you are forced apart, you'll always carry the imprint of their soul with you, steady as a heartbeat. Forever....” ― Melody Grace, Unbroken
“Emerson lifts his head. His eyes are two dark pools of desire, a clouded night’s sky. He catches his breath a moment, unsteady, and then drops a kiss on my lips. Sweet. Almost tender. I barely have time to take it in before he grabs my shoulder and spins me around, pushing me so my bare chest is slammed up into the wall, my cheek pressed against the cold concrete. I gasp, my heart skipping with the thrill. I can feel him up against me, a solid wall of muscle trapping me in place, the hard ridge of him pressed against the small of my back. I can’t move, or see the expression on his face, only hear the hoarse groan Emerson sounds as he twists a handful of my hair and yanks it to one side, kissing a searing trail along the curve of my neck.I whimper, bound and powerless against him, and oh God, loving every minute of it.” ― Melody Grace, Unbroken
“She had no need in her heart for either book or magazine. She had her own way of escape, her own passage into contentment: her rosary. That string of white beads, the tiny links worn in a dozen places and held together by strands of white thread which in turn broke regularly, was, bead for bead, her quiet flight out of the world. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. And Maria began to climb. Bead for bead, life and living fell away. Hail Mary, Hail Mary. Dream without sleep encompassed her. Passion without flesh lulled her. Love without death crooned the melody of belief. She was away: she was free; she was no longer Maria, American or Italian, poor or rich, with or without electric washing machines and vacuum cleaners; here was the land of all-possessing. Hail Mary, Hail Mary, over and over, a thousand and a hundred thousand times, prayer upon prayer, the sleep of the body, the escape of the mind, the death of memory, the slipping away of pain, the deep silent reverie of belief. Hail Mary and Hail Mary. It was for this that she lived.” ― John Fante, Wait Until Spring, Bandini
“Agenda is bad when it usurps the beauty. Christian art should strive for a marriage of the two, just as Christ is described as being “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Truth without beauty can be a weapon; beauty without truth can be spineless. The two together are like lyric and melody. This is not to say that beauty itself isn’t a kind of truth, nor that truth itself isn’t beautiful. It’ll take a better philosopher than me to parse all that out. (I commend to you authors like Steve Guthrie and Jeremy Begbie if you want to swim in those deep but lovely waters.)” ― Andrew Peterson, Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making
“I cant believe you named your boat after me.... " Emerson coughs. "Well i figured it suited her" He gives me a devilish grin. "She was a stubborn bitch, but once i got my hands on her, she fell into line” ― Melody Grace, Unbroken
“QUALITIESThere is a sun-star rising outside form.I am lost in that other. It's sweet notto look at two worlds, to melt in meaningas honey melts in milk. No one tires of following the soul. I don't recall now whathappens on the manifest plane. I strollwith those I have always wanted to know,fresh and graceful as a water lily, or a rose.The body is a boat; I am waves swaying against it. Whenever it anchors somewhere, I smashit loose, or smash it to pieces. If I getlazy and cold, flames come from my ocean and surround me. I laugh inside them like gold purifying itself. A certain melody makesthe snake put his head down on a line in the dirt....Here is my head, brother: Whatnext! Weary of form, I come into qualities.Each says, "I am a blue-green sea. Diveinto me!" I am Alexander at the outermostextension of empire, turning all my armiesin toward the meaning of armies, Shams.” ― Rumi, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems
“I don't want to call her a shallow bitch, but she earns it.” ― Melody Grace, Unbroken
“This is my favorite place in the world" Emerson's voice is low, thick with desire. "Right here. In you” ― Melody Grace, Unbroken
“Almost I feel the pulsebeat of the ages, Now swift, now slow, beneath my fingertips.The heartthrobs of the prophets and the sagesBeat through these bindings; and my quick hand slipsOld books from dusty shelves, in eager seekingFor truths the flaming tongues of the ancients tell;For the words of wisdom that they still are speakingAs clearly as an echoing silver bell.Here is the melody that lies foreverAt the deep heart of living; here we keepThe accurate recorded discs that neverCan be quite silenced, though their makers sleepThe still deep sleep, so long as a seeker findsThe indelible imprint of their moving minds.” ― Grace Noll Crowell
“O music! A melody occurs to you; you sing it silently, inwardly only; you steep your being in it; it takes possession of all your strength and emotions, and during the time it lives in you, it effaces all that is fortuitous, evil, coarse, and sad in you; it brings the world into harmony with you, it makes burdens light and gives wings to depressed spirits. The melody of a folk song can do that. And first of all harmony! For each harmonious chord of pure-toned notes - those of church bells, for example - fills the spirit with grace and delight, a feeling that is intensified by every additional note; and at times this can enchant the heart and make it tremble with bliss as no other sensual pleasure can.” ― Hermann Hesse, Gertrude
“Yes You Are!Like the Blossoming rose,Like the Rays of hope.Like a deer in the forest,Like an athlete full of zest.Like a lamp in temple,Like the life feeling ample.Like the feel of the dawn,Like the grace of the swan.Like the melody of sitar,Like the rage of guitar.Like a group of angels in the sky,Like the pot that makes you high.Like the peacock's dance,Like she is the romance.Like the silent talk,Like the wine from Medoc.Like the colors of life,Like the music from the fife.Like the calmness of the cold windLike the beauty of the hind.” ― Ameya Agrawal, A Leap Within
