More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I’d always known a vein of wildness ran through me. Like Caroline loved dolls, I was drawn to trees. I’d climb the old apple at the bottom of our garden every day and sit on the highest branches, sniffing the sea.
The sun is out, streaming through the branches. And the light is really nice, amber and soft. Like looking at the world through a bar of Pears soap.
She can be silent with him, neither of them speaking a word, and feel like they’re having a conversation. That she’s not entirely alone here.
like you do when people are unexpectedly kind and understand deep unknowable things about you without being told.
The forest’s never looked more magical or benign, a place of sanctuary, not a mass of trees of different species, but a sentient ancient being, with its own moods and soul.
She inwardly jolts, as you do at the odd moment when one version of yourself becomes another, and you grow up not incrementally but in one unexpected gliding-forward leap, as if taking a step on the moon.
A forest, I realize, stepping into it, succumbing to it, only reveals its true nature to the solitary walker. And it’s indifferent to me. I’ve got no more right to exist here than a bramble or a fox. I decide I like this. Liberating. Which way?
shadowed by the trees that lock over it in an emerald-green canopy.
‘Yes, exactly, Sylvie, just like that,’ and telling me that if you cut open a human brain, slice it really thin, like salami, and peer at it under a microscope, you’ll see trees. Dendrites, they’re called. And all your thoughts, all the tiny electrical messages, shoot from branch to branch. ‘We have woods inside us, Sylvie,’ he said, then hugged me and kissed the top of my head.
her determination to do everything right, she’d got it all wrong.
‘Don’t worry what other people think, be who you want to be.
We’re born with a love of trees deep in our souls, she decides. Like a love of the sea.
