Juniper Hill Quotes

I’m not the kind of man who gives up what’s good. And we’re good. We’re fucking good, honey.

November--with uncanny witchery in its changed trees. With murky red sunsets flaming in smoky crimson behind the westering hills. With dear days when the austere woods were beautiful and gracious in a dignified serenity of folded hands and closed eyes--days full of a fine, pale sunshine that sifted through the late, leafless gold of the juniper-trees and glimmered among the grey beeches, lighting up evergreen banks of moss and washing the colonnades of the pines. Days with a high-sprung sky of flawless turquoise. Days when an exquisite melancholy seemed to hang over the landscape and dream about the lake. But days, too, of the wild blackness of great autumn storms, followed by dank, wet, streaming nights when there was witch-laughter in the pines and fitful moans among the mainland trees. What cared they? Old Tom had built his roof well, and his chimney drew.

Standing on your own doesn't mean you have to be alone. There's a difference.

In that mess, there was passion. In that passion, we were perfect.

I'm going to take them. I'm going to take all your bests. Every damn one until you cant keep track of the top five anymore because there are so many bests that you'll need a hundred to capture them all. Promise. I swear it.

I want a big, chaotic family to fill the house. I want to step on toys in the middle of the night. I want to break apart fight and bandage up skinned knees. I want the mess. I want the passion. I want to watch you grow our kids.

I cook for you because it’s how I show someone I care. I cook for you because I love the look on your face after that first bite. I cook for you because I’d rather cook for you than anyone else.” “What?” My jaw dropped. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing with you, woman.” My mouth was still open. Which suited Knox just fine. Because he raised his hands, framed my face. Then sealed his lips over mine.

You are... you are a dream, I gave up on those.

Passion comes from the mess, Memphis.

I cook for you because it’s how I show someone I care. I cook for you because I love the look on your face after that first bite. I cook for you because I’d rather cook for you than anyone else.

If we tried this and it didn’t work, you’d lose him.” “Yeah.” He nodded. “I know what’s on the line, Memphis. But I’m standing here anyway.

I didn’t like to see Drake cry. But Memphis? It was like getting the wind knocked out of me.

But I'm not the kind of man who gives up what's good. And we are good. We are fucking good, honey.

Don’t look at me like that.” “Like what?” I stepped closer, fitting my hand to her jaw. “Like you need to be kissed.

But forevers were for dreamers

What else do you want. You.

I don't want to be your mistake. Those words held so much pain. So much weight. Shed been someone elses mistake.

I didn’t like having people in my kitchen. Even Mom and Lyla knew not to intrude when they came over. For Memphis, I’d make an exception.

Touch her again and they’ll never find your body.

Maybe I’d lost my shine, but I was a better person without it.

Maybe motherhood wasn’t always being the person your child leaned on, but finding the person they needed when you weren’t enough.

When you lived with sharks, you marked the days when a life raft came floating your way.

He had a treasure, a pure gold treasure, and rather than cherish her, he did used her for his own greed.

Knox was a good man. He was as reliable as the sunrise. As breathtaking as the Montana sunsets. He was the type of person I wanted Drake to become.

Motherhood, I’d learned in the past two months, was nothing more than a ritual of second-guessing yourself.

I’d killed that version of myself. I’d stabbed her to death with the shards of a broken heart.

Then here’s another truth. I’m going to take them. I’m going to take all of your bests. Every damn one until you can’t keep track of the top five anymore because there are so many bests that you’ll need a hundred to capture them all.

Then here’s another truth. I’m going to take them. I’m going to take all of your bests. Every damn one until you can’t keep track of the top five anymore because there are so many bests that you’ll need a hundred to capture them all.” “Promise?” I whispered. “I swear it.

Another tear, one that she hadn’t been able to dry, dripped down her cheek. I didn’t like to see Drake cry. But Memphis? It was like getting the wind knocked out of me. “Hey.” I went to her side and fit my hand to her elbow. “What happened, honey?” “I just . . .” Her shoulders sagged. “I had a bad day.

How long could a person hold on the end of their rope before their grip slipped?

Knox was more tempting than any meal. More dangerous than the knife in his grasp.

Memphis was a sweet temptation and a sinful craving

I craved her, more than id ever craved anyone in a long, long time. And that scared the hell out of me.

A kiss to change a life. Or destroy one.

His mess. In that mess, there was passion. In that passion, we were perfect.

You are . . . you are a dream,” he breathed. “I gave up on those.” My breath hitched. “So did I.

I know what’s on the line, Memphis. But I’m standing here anyway.

You are . . . you are a dream,” he breathed. “I gave up on those.

That tiny cry was like a dagger to my heart. It was the sound of a dream lost. The sound of a family gone.

Headache, Knox?" Skip asked. "Yeah." Her name was Memphis Ward.

Beyond the windows, the snowstorm raged. Here, us, together, we were ablaze.

Passion comes from the mess, Memphis.” He threaded his hands into my hair. “So does everything lasting.

Memphis? My Memphis?” She arched her eyebrows. “Your Memphis?

I COME FROM THE belly of the snake. The dark side of the moon. From my grandmother’s gin still: juniper berries, coriander, orrisroot. I leave a bitter taste on your tongue.

I'm going to take them. I'm going to take all your bests. Every damn one until you cant keep track of the top five anymore because there are so many bests that you'll need a hundred to capture them all. Promise. I swear it

He strode toward me, taking my face in his hands. “Then here’s another truth. I’m going to take them. I’m going to take all of your bests. Every damn one until you can’t keep track of the top five anymore because there are so many bests that you’ll need a hundred to capture them all.

At the door to the shop, a bell tinkled, and moments later they seemed to enter the very flowering of lavender. The scent was all around them; it curled and diffused in the air with a sweet warmth and subtlety, then burst with a peppery, musky intensity. The blind girls moved into another room. There they arranged themselves expectantly around a long wooden table, Mme Musset welcomed them, and a cork was pulled with a squeaky pop. "This is pure essence of lavender, grown on the Valensole plateau," said Madame. "It is in a glass bottle I am sending around to the right for you all to smell. Be patient, and you will get your turn." Other scents followed: rose and mimosa and oil of almond. Now that they felt more relaxed, some of the other girls started being silly, pretending to sniff too hard and claiming the liquid leapt up at them. Marthe remained silent and composed, concentrating hard. Then came the various blends: the lavender and rosemary antiseptic, the orange and clove scent for the house in winter, the liqueur with the tang of juniper that made Marthe unexpectedly homesick for her family's farming hamlet over the hills to the west, where as a child she had been able to see brightness and colors and precise shapes of faces and hills and fruits and flowers.

And as we pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called "sage brush" appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic.

Is that what you think? That I cook for you because you can’t cook for yourself?” “Well . . . yes.” He scoffed, turning his head to the ceiling. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he muttered something. Then he faced me again, taking a long step forward to crowd my space. “I cook for you because it’s how I show someone I care. I cook for you because I love the look on your face after that first bite. I cook for you because I’d rather cook for you than anyone else.” “What?” My jaw dropped. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing with you, woman.” My mouth was still open. Which suited Knox just fine. Because he raised his hands, framed my face. Then sealed his lips over mine.

The words and ways this requires are…potent. They come at a price—power always does. This isn’t a matter of wrong or right, you understand, but merely the working of the world. If you want strength, if you want to survive, there must be sacrifice.” That’s not what Mags taught them. You can tell the wickedness of a witch by the wickedness of her ways. “So who paid your price?” He bends his neck to look directly at her, weighing something. “A fever spread through my parents’ village that first winter.” The word fever rings in Juniper’s ears, a distant bell toiling. “It was nothing too remarkable, except the midwives and wise women couldn’t cure it. One of them came sniffing around, made certain deductions…I took her shadow, too. And the sickness spread further. The villagers grew unruly. Hysterical. I did what I had to do in order to protect myself.” That line has smoothed-over feel, like a polished pebble, as if he’s said it many times to himself. “But then of course the fever spread even further… I didn’t know how to control it, yet. Which kinda of people were expendable and which weren’t. I’m more careful these days.” The ringing in Juniper’s ears is louder now, deafening. An uncanny illness, the Three had called it. Juniper remembers the illustrations in Miss Hurston’s moldy schoolbooks, showing abandoned villages and overfull graveyards, carts piled high with bloated bodies. Was that Gideon’s price? Had the entire world paid for the sins of one broken, bitter boy? And—were they paying again? I’m more careful these days. Juniper thinks of Eve’s labored breathing, the endless rows of cots at Charity Hospital, the fever that raged through the city’s tenements and row houses and dim alleys, preying on the poor and brown and foreign—the expendable. Oh, you bastard. But Hill doesn’t seem to hear the hitch in her breathing. “People grew frightened, angry. They marched on my village with torches, looking for a villain. So I gave them one.” Hill lifts both hands, palm up: What would you have of me? “I told them a story about an old witch woman who lived in a hut in the roots of an old oak. I told them she spoke with devils and brewed pestilence and death in her cauldron. They believed me.” His voice is perfectly dispassionate, neither guilty nor grieving. “They burned her books and then her. When they left my village I left with them, riding at their head.” So: the young George of Hyll had broken the world, then pointed his finger at his fellow witches like a little boy caught making a mess. He had survived, at any cost, at every cost. Oh, you absolute damn bastard.

The desert scents were heady and intoxicating. Sage and juniper and creosote. Pungent, sharp and whispery. The desert sand itself seemed to have a scent all its own, too. Something ancient that hinted at death, at life, of survival and of distant memories. This place, so close to civilization, yet so far removed, too, smelled as it had for eons, for millenniums. The sand, I knew, was sprinkled with the bones of the dead. Dead vermin, dead coyotes, dead anything and everything that ever ventured into these bleak hills. I

Philip stirred. The bed beneath him felt hard as stone; his body was cramped from lying on it. Then his eyes opened. The bed was stone, for he and Linda were lying on the rock shelf above the beach. Beside him, he saw her sleeping form, still covered by the space-blanket. In the half-light he could make out the rowboat drawn up on the shingle. He was wearing his jeans and sweater; above them the sky glowed rose and apricot with dawn. “Linda!” The involuntary loudness of his cry echoed out across the water. From the farthest margin of the lake a loon’s voice answered, then another and another, until four plangent, trembling voices took up their chorus among the silence of the hills. She stirred. “Philip, I’ve had the strangest dream.” “Not a dream!” But everything disproved his words and turned them into illusions, into lies: the cabin that rose, solid and shuttered, on the opposite head of land; the gray mist coiling over the water; the smell of juniper, pungent in the dawn chill. They pushed back the plastic blanket and stood up, looking dazedly around them. Linda gave a long, soft sigh. “We’re home,” she said. Still Philip could not accept the evidence of eyes and ears and hands. He sat down and bowed his head. “He didn’t even give us the chance to say good-by.” “Yes, he did, Philip.” He heard strength and gentleness in Linda’s voice, from which all sharpness had disappeared. “But we didn’t understand.” “No. It’s hard, though.” Philip turned so that she would not see his face. A tear slid down onto the sleeve of his sweater. He wiped it away and stopped, arrested, staring. As he looked, his despair changed slowly to a still, triumphant joy. For circling his wrists, faint and indelible as an ancient scar, he saw the mark of Kyril’s hands.

Almost as soon as I arrived back at Njoro, it began to rain for the first time in over a year. The sky went black, splitting open with a deluge that didn’t want to stop. Five inches fell in two days, and when the storm had finally cleared, and our long drought had ended, the land went green again. Flowers sprang across the plains in every colour you could think of. The air was thick with jasmine and coffee blossoms, juniper berries, and eucalyptus. Kenya had only been sleeping, the rain said now. All that had died could live again—except Green Hills.

Juniper . . . pets . . . cupcakes. How can one even put those two things in the same . . . It doesn’t matter.

People in town gossiped and clucked their tongues about Mama Mags, wondering to one another how a person could live all alone like that, but it sounded alright to Juniper. She’d never had any interest in boys or betrothals or the things that came after; she’d figured she’d spend her days clearing henbit and cudweed from the herb-garden and chatting with the sycamores. In the fall-times maybe she and her red staff would go walking in the hills with a basket over her arm, collecting foxglove and ninebark, snake-skins and bone, sleeping beneath the clean light of stars.

Juniper figures a few hundred years of always getting his own way has spoiled Mr. Gideon Hill. He’s grown used to weak wills and whispered words, to women bound and burning. But Juniper learned spite in the cradle. She knows all about grit and spine. She plants her feet and holds fast.

You are mine. Drake is mine. For all of your todays and each of your tomorrows.

Passion comes from the mess,

She closed her eyes and peppered Drake’s forehead with kisses. His fussing stopped almost immediately. How could she not see how much she settled him? Yeah, maybe they struggled at one in the morning. But that kid needed her like she needed him. Those two were destined to be together. Watching them was like intruding on a ritual, a moment that they had each day, coming home and finding peace together.

It’s just the truth.” He strode toward me, taking my face in his hands. “Then here’s another truth. I’m going to take them. I’m going to take all of your bests. Every damn one until you can’t keep track of the top five anymore because there are so many bests that you’ll need a hundred to capture them all.” “Promise?” I whispered. “I swear it.

I had the best parents in the world. They let us fail when we needed to fail. They gave us a hand when it was clear we couldn’t get back up on our own two feet. They loved us unconditionally. They’d given us every advantage possible.

A bird chirped

If I was going to make it to that one day, it would require sacrifices like blue box mac ’n’ cheese and ramen noodles.

that mess, there was passion. In that passion, we were perfect.

Until 1839 South Mills was New Lebanon, named by Bible-minded people inspired by the great stately Atlantic white cedars, or juniper, that throve in vast stretches of the Swamp all around them.

The tendrils of her hair swished against her waist.

I'm going to take all of your bests. Every damn one until you can't keep track of the top five anymore because there are so many bests that you'll need a hundred to capture them all.