Memorable and interesting quotes from great books. But as with giving help and accepting it, we had to do both to be made complete- like links overlapping to form a chain, or a lock finding the right key.īookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, Being needed by someone else, though, that was the hard part. Needing was so easy: it came naturally, like breathing. I'd given him one but not the other, because at the time I thought I couldn't, and then proved myself right by doing exactly as my mother had, hurting to prevent from being hurt myself. Who picked me up, literally, over and over again, and never asked for anything in return except for my word and my understanding. Nate, who was a friend to me before I even knew what a friend was. It was Jamie, who took me in without question and gave me a future I once couldn't even imagine Oliva, who did question, but also gave me answers Harriet, who, like me, believed she needed no one and discovered otherwise. So my true family was not just my mom, lost or found my dad, gone from the start and Cora, the only one who had really been there all along. The trick was to take what each could give you and build a world from it. You couldn't make any one person your world. None of them were perfect, and we couldn't expect them to be. Our family of origin, the family we created, as well as the groups you moved through while all of this was happening: friends, lovers, sometimes even strangers. Cora was right- we had many families over time.

It wasn't just about blood relations or shared chromosomes, but something wider, bigger. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless. “What is family? They were the people who claimed you.

Lock and key by sarah dessen