Best 26 quotes of Menna Van Praag on MyQuotes

After breakfast, Kat would go around to the neighbors with her mother, carrying a basket of bread. During the week, they'd make inquiries to see who needed their help. They baked yarrow bread for those with broken hearts, sorrel bread for neglected children, stephanotis bread for couples who were fighting, pear blossom bread for anyone grieving, laurel bread for those needing financial help, and a simple sage bread for everyone else.

After he's gone Greer sits for a long time. She rests her head on her knees and weeps - not because she loved Blake and not because she's lost him. But because she did not care of herself. She knew Blake's nature the moment she met him, just as she knew the philandering fiancé. She knew them and she knew herself. Greer thinks of the story of the scorpion and the frog, and she knows she cannot blame these men for her messy life, they only did what she always knew they would do. No, this is not about crushed hopes and broken dreams. This is about trusting her own heart. Hope doesn't even enter into it.

As it turned out, Cosima had quite a flair for flavor. She created things that shocked Kat, who had only ever followed her mother's more mundane recipes. One Saturday, Cosima made rosemary, stilton, and walnut bread and their father ran up and down the street after breakfast, telling his neighbors he was training for a marathon. Another Saturday her bacon and brie bread caused Peter Rubens to quit his sales job and revisit a great passion for pottery and carpentry that he'd long before abandoned. Kat personally puts her father's remarriage down to the chocolate and chili bread Cosima made when she was six, Kat liked her stepmother and loved that she was finally free to leave her father and little sister and go out into the world to live her own life.

As the milky early morning sun slips in through her kitchen windows, Cosima plucks the blossoms off her yellow squash and begins to make her way through today's menu: courgette blossom and artichoke pizza, wild mushroom and tomato bruschetta, lemon and pistachio cake, vanilla and orange oil cannoli, espresso and hazelnut tart... And into each bowl she sprinkles a generous pinch of paternal love, protection, and devotion.

As the thick liquid slips down her throat and into her belly, Alba starts to feel warm and soft, as if the kitchen has just hugged her. And, after a few minutes she isn't scared to tell the truth anymore. At least a little bit of truth.

Etta sticks a small hand into a rack of crimson ball gowns and plucks out one of her loveliest creations. The bodice is made of spiderweb lace, thousands of roses embroidered over herringbone, ending at the waist with waterfalls of dark red silk cascading to the floor.

Every table is sprinkled with rose petal confetti; every place is set with a single chocolate and rosewater cupcake with swirls of pink icing, each of them topped with a frosted cinquefoil (beloved daughter) flower. Pink balloons bounce and bob against the ceiling and a vast array of cakes of every variety crowd the counter: chocolate and pistachio cream, vanilla and elderflower, red velvet, passion fruit and pear, white frosted layer cake.

Great love only comes once in a lifetime, if you're lucky.

He has always loved to read aloud, to hear words float about a room, to swim in stories and breathe in poetry. And he has a powerful voice, a beautiful voice, as deep, thick and rich as melted chocolate. Characters seem to come alive when he speaks, sliding off the page to stalk the bookshop aisles and relive their fictional lives in 3-D and Technicolor. At night, after Walt flips over the "closed" sign on the front door, he sits back behind the counter and opens doors to other worlds: bookshelves transmute into swamp trees, floors into muddy marshes, the ceiling into a purple sky cracked with lightning as he floats down the Mississippi with Huck Finn. When he meets Robinson Crusoe, the trees become heavy with coconuts, the floorboards a barren desert of sand dunes whipped by screeching winds. When he fights pirates off the coasts of Treasure Island, the floors dip and heave, the salty splash of ocean waves stings his eyes and clouds of gunpowder stain the air. As a rule Walt sticks with adventures and leaves romances untouched, preferring to escape his own aching heart rather than being reminded of it.

I long for a little life, an everyday life, a splash of sunlight through a window a smile from a stranger - a heart to hold in mine.

It happens the same way every time. The woman usually stands in front of the mirror for a while, turning this way and that, checking to be certain it isn't an illusion. And, when she is at last sure it's real, a blissful smile spreads into her cheeks and flushes through her whole body. In the mirror she sees herself as she truly is: beautiful, powerful, able to do anything. And she sees that the thing she wants most of all, the thing that seemed so impossible when she first stepped into the little dress shop, is really so possible, so close, that she could reach out and touch it. "Yes," Etta says then, "as easy as pie. Speaking of which, the bookshop on the corner does the most delicious cherry pie. You really should try some." The woman nods then, still slightly stunned, and agrees, saying that pie sounds like a perfect idea. So she stumbles out of the shop in a daze, new dress tucked tightly in her arms, and wanders down All Saints' Passage to the bookshop. There, she has the best piece of cherry pie she's ever eaten and leaves with a stack of books that will make the transformation complete.

It's a great shame, she thinks, that the heart cannot feel joy without also feeling pain, that it cannot know love without also knowing loss.

It's always best to feel fulfilled first, before finding a man. Then you'll know the value of yourself, and you'll hold the key to your own happiness. So you won't turn into a vulnerable, needy, emotional mess the minute you fall in love.

It’s not just the books Alba craves, it’s standing inside a place that houses millions of them. Libraries are Alba’s churches, and the university library, containing one edition of every book ever published in England, is her cathedral.

Noa sleeps with the curtains open, allowing as much moonlight as possible to flood her bedroom, allowing her to see each and every picture on the walls, if only as a pale glimmer. It took Noa weeks to perfect the art display. Reproductions of Monet's gardens at Giverny blanket one wall: thousands of violets- smudges of purples and mauves- and azaleas, poppies, and peonies, tulips and roses, water lilies in pastel pinks floating on serene lakes reflecting weeping willows and shimmers of sunshine. Turner's sunsets adorn another: bright eyes of gold at the center of skies and seas of searing magenta or soft blue. The third wall is splashed with Jackson Pollocks: a hundred different colors streaked and splattered above Noa's bed. The fourth wall is decorated by Rothko: blocks of blue and red and yellow blending and bleeding together. The ceiling is papered with the abstract shapes of Kandinsky: triangles, circles, and lines tumbling over one another in energetic acrobatics.

Not settles herself in the farthest reaches of the gallery, admiring the work of an artist she hasn't seen before. The canvases are large and dark, great splashes of royal blue on black, what appear to be deep purple seas beneath deep red skies. They remind her of Turner's tranquil sunsets, with a slightly sinister edge, as if sharks swim in the purple seas and black crows caw through the red skies.

Occasionally, Kat detects the aftertaste of a spell in Cosima's cooking- one to add extra flavor or mask the bitterness of being burned on a slice of cake or a pistachio croissant- but nothing too serious. As children, Kat had taught Cosima a few tricks now and then, including the odd baking spell, but her little sister had always been more interested in playing with her dolls than learning the magical properties of flowers and herbs. Cosima's games always involved weddings starring Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, or Rapunzel marrying Prince Charming.

She put so much love and magic into her baking. I bet you all had your favorite-" Kat tries to swallow her tears but she can't. "Pistachio cream croissants!" Noa shouts out. Kat blinks, scanning the crowd for the perpetrator and sees Noa looking up at her, grinning. Kat nods. "My favorite too." She looks out at the congregation again, blinking back her tears. "Zucchini and caramelized onion pizza!" someone else shouts. Kat sniffs, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. "Tiramisu cheesecake!" "Vanilla and elderflower brownies!" "Cinnamon and nutmeg biscuits!" "Spiced chocolate cake!" Kat starts to smile. She looks out at the congregation, at their happy, memory-filled faces, the taste of Cosima's baking still on their tongues, and feels her heart begin to lift. "Passion fruit and pear cannoli!" "Chocolate and pistachio cream cupcakes!" shouts Amandine. "Dough twists dipped in Nutella!" Heloise calls out.

The heart cannot feel joy without also feeling pain, it cannot know love without also knowing loss.

The molecular structure of love: one proton of faith, three electrons of humility, a neutron of compassion, and a bond of honesty.

The only way to stop hurting other people is to stop hurting yourself.

They're sitting on the floor in A Stitch in Time, surrounded on all sides by dresses of every imaginable color. Cora realizes as she glances around, her gaze flitting quickly from one wall to the next, that Etta has arranged them like the seasons: sparkling whites, grays, blacks for winter; shimmering greens and blues for spring; pinks and purples for summer; reds, oranges and yellows for autumn. Together they are breathtaking, almost too bright if stared at for too long, like falling through a rainbow lit by the sun.

Walt's father had been shopping with his son on a Sunday afternoon when he'd wandered into All Saints' Passage and found the bookshop. A silent boy, Walt still hadn't spoken, so there was no reason to think he'd be interested in reading yet. But when Walt snuck through the door, under his father's arm, he let out a gasp of delight. He had stepped into a kingdom: an oak labyrinth of bookshelves, corridors and canyons of literature beckoning him, whispering enchanting words Walt had never heard before. The air was smoky with the scent of leather, ink and paper, caramel-rich and citrus-sharp. Walt stuck out his small tongue to taste this new flavor and grinned, sticky with excitement. And he knew, all of a sudden and deep in his soul, that this was a place he belonged more than any other.

What's your name?" he asked. She'd turned to him with a deep frown, instantly terrifying him. About to turn to escape back into the bookshop, Walt was stopped by her shrug. "Cora." "That's a funny name." "It isn't, actually." Cora's frown deepened. She pulled herself up to her full height of four foot three inches. 'Officially my name is Cori, but Grandma calls me Cora. I'm named in honor of Gerty Cori, the first woman winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine. I bet you didn't know that." "No," Walt admitted, embarrassed. "I didn't." "What's your name?" "Walt," he offered quietly, expecting her to retort that his was an even sillier name, but she didn't. "After the scientist?" Walt frowned, thrown. "What scientist?" Cora shrugged. "Maybe Luis Walter Alvarez or Walter Reed, but... actually Walter Sutton is the most famous. He invented a theory about chromosomes and the Mendelian laws of inheritance." Cora let slip a little smile of satisfaction at the blank look on the boy's face. "Or maybe Walter Lewis-" "No," Walt interrupted, "I've never heard of any of them." "Oh." Cora folded her arms and tilted her nose upward. "Then who are you named after?" she asked, as if this was a given. "Walt Whitman," he retorted. "The poet.

When you follow your heart you allow miraculous possibilities to unfold.

You need tea and cake?" "I'm not hungry," Cora says, following Etta upstairs. "Oh, my dear." Etta laughs, the sound humming around her. "When is cake ever for hunger? It's for flavor and, in this case, comfort." Behind her grandmother, Cora smiles. They walk into the kitchen and Etta flicks on the kettle. On the counter sits a large chocolate cake, icing shining and dotted with cherries. The room is filled with the thick scent of chocolate. "It's beautiful," Cora says. "You're the best grandma a girl could hope for." "Hardly." Etta sets out two plates and begins cutting the cake. "Anyway, it's not that cherry pie you love so much, but it will have to do.