The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

★★★★
"I wanted more than anything to be that girl, to be a child again and carry crocus or hawthorn or larkspur instead of buckets of thistle.  I wanted to search the North Bay until I found Elizabeth, and apologize, and beg forgiveness.  I wanted to start my life over, on a course that would not lead me to this moment, this waking up alone in a city park, my own daughter alone in an empty apartment building.  Every decision I'd ever made had led me here, and I wanted to take it all back, the hatred and the blame and the violence.  I wanted to have lunch with my angry ten-year-old self to warn her of this morning and give her the flowers to point her in a different direction."

The Walking Dead: Compendium One, Vol. 1-48 by Robert Kirkman

★★★
"Maybe we were just fooling ourselves until something happened that was big enough to make us stop and realize how crazy our world really is."

Virgin Earth by Philippa Gregory

★★★★
" 'I've been in my father's shadow all my life, John said, more to himself than to the silent man.  When I came here for the first time it was virgin earth for me, because it was somewhere he had not been, with plants that he had not seen, a place where he had not made friends and where people would not always know me as his son, a lesser copy of the real thing.' "

Earthly Joys by Philippa Gregory

★★★★
" 'I with we had called them 'Tradescantia' when Lord Cecil first gave them to you to grow.  You were the first to grow them; you had the right.'

Josh shrugged his shoulders as if it did not matter what they were named as long as they grew tall and strong.  'The name does not matter.  Rights do not matter.  But to grow a new tree, to put a new tree into the gardens of England - now that is to live forever.' "

Blue Asylum by Kathy Hepinstall

★★★★

"They had engaged in what could not be called treatment or even discussion, but open combat, the two of them a microcosm of the great war raging in the far distance: one side that desired autonomy, and the other that took independence as a sign of madness."

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

★★★

"It is a bit of a chiche to characterize life as a rambling journey on which we can alter our course at any given time...In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge.  In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred in decisions, for a hundred visions and revisions - we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second.  and before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come."

The Shoemaker's Wife by Adriana Trigiani

★★★★

"He promised to love me.  And for once in my life, I'm going to do the impractical, unwise, ill-advised thing.  I'm going to make a decision based upon the feeling I have in my heart, and not what looks good on paper or makes anyone else happy.  I'm going to do something for me, and I'll live with whatever Ciro brings into my life and be happy that I did."

This book was #9 on my top ten list of 2013.