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From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home

Tembi Locke

Top 10 Best Quotes

“Pain is part of life. That much I knew. If I could just teach her how to be resilient, how to love big, how to fear less. How to weather hurt, either at the hands of others or even the hurts she might unknowingly inflict on herself. I wanted her to know that love can come in many forms. That sometimes it can look like letting go, but it can also look like never letting go. That one day she might have to love someone in ways the world wasn’t ready for. That reaching for that kind of love would bring with it struggle, but in the end, it could be grander than her wildest imaginings.”

“He soothed the places I hadn't known needed soothing, seemed perfectly willing to embrace the parts of me that were wanton, unsettled, unfinished, and contradictory. Together we had engaged life as two forks eating off one plate. Ready to listen, to love, to look into the darkness and see a thin filament of the moon.”

“Cooking is about surrender.”

“Yet nothing about dying was easy. Not for him nor for me. It was labor, as much labor as coming into this world.”

“want you to know love someday. Another love. Your love is too beautiful not to share.” He said it with ease, not a trace of distress or ambivalence. As if it were the most natural thing for a husband to say to a wife. “I want you to live your life.”

“We had to begin at an ending and make a new beginning.”

“He was kryptonite sprinkled on pizza, my personal weakness”

“The connection you are creating here is like a flower. It requires soil and sun, things that, thanks to God, are given freely. But it is you, all of us, who has to water the flower to make it grow. Without water, all relations remain small. They can’t open, and eventually they die.”

“What if my own life was like a flower? Something I had to continually tend to and nurture. Sicily was the water and sun that fortified me to stand stronger in my life after loss. And maybe my leaving a rock at the cemetery, as an act of remembrance, had additional meaning. Maybe it was a symbol of the lasting permanence of Saro's love. His love, life, illness, and death had taught me so much but it was the undergirding of his love that was my salvation in loss.”

“The connection you are creating here is like a flower. It requires soil and sun. things that, thanks to God, are given freely. But it is you, all of us, who has to water the flower to make it grow, Without water, all relations remain small. They can't open, and eventually die”

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Book Keywords:

memoir, cooking, grief, labor, death, italy, touching, grief-and-loss, endings-and-beginnings, sicily

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