Hallelujah Quotes

Your faith was strong, but you needed proof...

~ Leonard Cohen

A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will record the wheeling of all the sky’s stars as a pattern of perfect, concentric circles. I seek a reduction, a shedding, a sloughing off. At the seashore you often see a shell, or fragment of a shell, that sharp sands and surf have thinned to a wisp. There is no way you can tell what kind of shell it had been, what creature it had housed; it could have been a whelk or a scallop, a cowrie, limpet, or conch. The animal is long since dissolved, and its blood spread and thinned in the general sea. All you hold in your hand is a cool shred of shell, an inch long, pared so thin that it passes a faint pink light. It is an essence, a smooth condensation of the air, a curve. I long for the North where unimpeded winds would hone me to such a pure slip of bone. But I’ll not go northing this year. I’ll stalk that floating pole and frigid air by waiting here. I wait on bridges; I wait, struck, on forest paths and meadow’s fringes, hilltops and banksides, day in and day out, and I receive a southing as a gift. The North washes down the mountains like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, and pours across the valley; it comes to me. It sweetens the persimmons and numbs the last of the crickets and hornets; it fans the flames of the forest maples, bows the meadow’s seeded grasses and pokes it chilling fingers under the leaf litter, thrusting the springtails and the earthworms deeper into the earth. The sun heaves to the south by day, and at night wild Orion emerges looming like the Specter over Dead Man Mountain. Something is already here, and more is coming.

~ Annie Dillard

I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt’ring eye and say, “Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?” The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.

~ Annie Dillard

All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted weightlessly on the head of a bankside purple thistle and began emptying the seedcase, sowing the air with down. The lighted frame of my window filled. The down rose and spread in all directions, wafting over the dam’s waterfall and wavering between the tulip trunks and into the meadow. It vaulted towards the orchard in a puff; it hovered over the ripening pawpaw fruit and staggered up the steep faced terrace. It jerked, floated, rolled, veered, swayed. The thistle down faltered down toward the cottage and gusted clear to the woods; it rose and entered the shaggy arms of pecans. At last it strayed like snow, blind and sweet, into the pool of the creek upstream, and into the race of the creek over rocks down. It shuddered onto the tips of growing grasses, where it poised, light, still wracked by errant quivers. I was holding my breath. Is this where we live, I thought, in this place in this moment, with the air so light and wild? The same fixity that collapses stars and drives the mantis to devour her mate eased these creatures together before my eyes: the thick adept bill of the goldfinch, and the feathery coded down. How could anything be amiss? If I myself were lighter and frayed, I could ride these small winds, too, taking my chances, for the pleasure of being so purely played. The thistle is part of Adam’s curse. “Cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.” A terrible curse: But does the goldfinch eat thorny sorrow with the thistle or do I? If this furling air is fallen, then the fall was happy indeed. If this creekside garden is sorrow, then I seek martyrdom. I was weightless; my bones were taut skins blown with buoyant gas; it seemed that if I inhaled too deeply, my shoulders and head would waft off. Alleluia.

~ Annie Dillard

Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready-for what? I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf. “For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see,” says Ruysbroeck, “and that is why He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else.” But what is the word? Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred, it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn’t make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note but I couldn’t catch the consonant that shaped it into sense.

~ Annie Dillard

In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away did he suddenly rise upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there.I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired to electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, “When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.

~ Annie Dillard

The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space in time. The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at any given second is a full field of color patches scattered just so. The configuration will never be repeated. Living is moving; time is a live creek bearing changing lights. As I move, or as the world moves around me, the fullness of what I see shatters. “Last forever!” Who hasn’t prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless. But there is more to the present than a series of snapshots. We are not merely sensitized film; we have feelings, a memory for information and an eidetic memory for the imagery of our pasts. Our layered consciousness is a tiered track for an unmatched assortment of concentrically wound reels. Each one plays out for all of life its dazzle and blur of translucent shadow-pictures; each one hums at every moment its own secret melody in its own unique key. We tune in and out. But moments are not lost. Time out of mind is time nevertheless, cumulative, informing the present. From even the deepest slumber you wake with a jolt- older, closer to death, and wiser, grateful for breath. But time is the one thing we have been given, and we have been given to time. Time gives us a whirl. We keep waking from a dream we can’t recall, looking around in surprise, and lapsing back, for years on end. All I want to do is stay awake, keep my head up, prop my eyes open, with toothpicks, with trees.

~ Annie Dillard

Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain…you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven’t you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered…there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse…and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe. “He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life.” We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn’t it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don’t know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore.

~ Annie Dillard

And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps and slides, across and down, across and down, leaking from here to there, minutely at a rate of a mile a year. What a tug of waters goes on! There are flings and pulls in every direction at every moment. The world is a wild wrestle under the grass; earth shall be moved. What else is going on right this minute while ground water creeps under my feet? The galaxy is careening in a slow, muffled widening. If a million solar systems are born every hour, then surely hundreds burst into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow. The sun’s surface is now exploding; other stars implode and vanish, heavy and black, out of sight. Meteorites are arcing to earth invisibly all day long. On the planet, the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades. Somewhere, someone under full sail is becalmed, in the horse latitudes, in the doldrums; in the northland, a trapper is maddened, crazed, by the eerie scent of the chinook, the sweater, a wind that can melt two feet of snow in a day. The pampero blows, and the tramontane, and the Boro, sirocco, levanter, mistral. Lick a finger; feel the now. Spring is seeping north, towards me and away from me, at sixteen miles a day. Along estuary banks of tidal rivers all over the world, snails in black clusters like currants are gliding up and down the stems of reed and sedge, migrating every moment with the dip and swing of tides. Behind me, Tinker Mountain is eroding one thousandth of an inch a year. The sharks I saw are roving up and down the coast. If the sharks cease roving, if they still their twist and rest for a moment, they die. They need new water pushed into their gills; they need dance. Somewhere east of me, on another continent, it is sunset, and starlings in breathtaking bands are winding high in the sky to their evening roost. The mantis egg cases are tied to the mock-orange hedge; within each case, within each egg, cells elongate, narrow, and split; cells bubble and curve inward, align, harden or hollow or stretch. And where are you now?

~ Annie Dillard

I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can’t think about them. I live with trees. There are creatures under our feet, creatures that live over our heads, but trees live quite convincingly in the same filament of air we inhabit, and in addition, they extend impressively in both directions, up and down, shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach.

~ Annie Dillard

You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo? You are a man, a retired railroad worker who makes replicas as a hobby. You decide to make a replica of one tree, the longleaf pine your great-grandfather planted- just a replica- it doesn’t have to work. How are you going to do it? How long do you think you might live, how good is your glue? For one thing, you are going to have to dig a hole and stick your replica trunk halfway to China if you want the thing to stand up. Because you will have to work fairly big; if your replica is too small, you’ll be unable to handle the slender, three-sided needles, affix them in clusters of three in fascicles, and attach those laden fascicles to flexible twigs. The twigs themselves must be covered by “many silvery-white, fringed, long-spreading scales.” Are your pine cones’ scales “thin, flat, rounded at the apex?” When you loose the lashed copper wire trussing the limbs to the trunk, the whole tree collapses like an umbrella. You are a sculptor. You climb a great ladder; you pour grease all over a growing longleaf pine. Next, you build a hollow cylinder around the entire pine…and pour wet plaster over and inside the pine. Now open the walls, split the plaster, saw down the tree, remove it, discard, and your intricate sculpture is ready: this is the shape of part of the air. You are a chloroplast moving in water heaved one hundred feet above ground. Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen in a ring around magnesium…you are evolution; you have only begun to make trees. You are god- are you tired? Finished?

~ Annie Dillard

Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients’ ultima Thule, the modern explorer’s Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in the mantis’s jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom’s nucleus one wild, distant electron that split showed a forest, swaying?

~ Annie Dillard

I was in no tent under leaves, sleepless and glad. There was no moon at all; along the world’s coasts the sea tides would be springing strong. The air itself also has lunar tides; I lay still. Could I feel in the air an invisible sweep and surge, and an answering knock in the lungs? Or could I feel the starlight? Every minute on a square mile of this land one ten thousandth of an ounce of starlight spatters to earth. What percentage of an ounce did that make on my eyes and cheeks and arms, tapping and nudging as particles, pulsing and stroking as waves?

~ Annie Dillard

It looked as though the leaves of the autumn forest had taken flight, and were pouring down the valley like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, all the leaves of the hardwoods from here to Hudson’s Bay. It was as if the season’s colors were draining away like lifeblood, as if the year were molting and shedding. The year was rolling down, and a vital curve had been reached, the tilt that gives way to headlong rush. And when the monarch butterflies had passed and were gone, the skies were vacant, the air poised. The dark night into which the year was plunging was not a sleep but an awakening, a new and necessary austerity, the sparer climate for which I longed. The shed trees were brittle and still, the creek light and cold, and my spirit holding its breath.

~ Annie Dillard

Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swings…They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir forest, which is happening right now at the rate of a mile every 10 years. When the last ice sheet receded from the North American continent, the earth rebounded 10 feet. Wouldn’t that have been a sight to see?

~ Annie Dillard

Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.”The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by a widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up-mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back.A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too swift and intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash frames. Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and then crumble, like patches of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues that roamed the earth’s surface, are a wavering blur whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any images. The great herds of caribou pour into the valleys and trickle back, and pour, a brown fluid. Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, like a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.

~ Annie Dillard

Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep blank space high up above many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman’s tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of dots. At length I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn’t find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn’t make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at that very moment with great emotion, in intricate, detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which wholly worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, “that was a good time then, a good time to be living.” And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water. I saw white-faced cattle lowing and wading in creeks. I saw May apples in forests, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided, and apples grew spotted and striped in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wild ducks flew with outstretched necks, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remember the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean’s shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, “yes, that’s how it was then, that part there was called France.” I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes. We all ought to be able to conjure up sights like these at will, so that we can keep in mind the scope of texture’s motion in time.

~ Annie Dillard

Were the earth as smooth as a ball bearing, it might be beautiful seen from another planet, as the rings of Saturn are. But here we live and move; we wander up and down the banks of the creek, we ride a railway through the Alps, and the landscape shifts and changes. Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture and lapse into dreamless sleep. Because we are living people, and because we are on the receiving end of beauty, another element necessarily enters the question. The texture of space is a condition of time. Time is the warp and matter the weft of woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurtling shuttle… What I want to do, then, is add time to the texture, paint the landscape on an unrolling scroll, and set the giant relief globe spinning on it stand.

~ Annie Dillard

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. The surface of mystery is not smooth, any more than the planet is smooth; not even a single hydrogen atom is smooth, let alone a pine. Nor does it fit together; not even the chlorophyll and hemoglobin molecules are a perfect match, for, even after the atom of iron replaces the magnesium, long streamers of disparate atoms trail disjointedly from the rims of the molecule’s loops. Freedom cuts both ways. Mystery itself is as fringed and intricate at the shape of the air at times. Forays into mystery cut bays and fine fjords, but the forested mainland itself is implacable both in its bulk and in its most filigreed fringe of detail.

~ Annie Dillard

I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table from me right now. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we- so incontrovertibly- are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the meantime, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can work at making sense of the color-patches we see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. I am as passionately interested in where I am as is a lone sailor sans sextant in a ketch on an open ocean. I have at the moment a situation which allows me to devote considerable hunks of time to seeing what I can see, and trying to piece it together. I’ve learned the name of some color-patches, but not the meanings. I’ve read books; I’ve gathered statistics feverishly: the average temperature of our planet is 57 degrees F…The average size of all living animals, including man, is almost that of a housefly. The earth is mostly granite, which is mostly oxygen…In these Appalachians we have found a coal bed with 120 seams, meaning 120 forests that just happened to fall into water…I would like to see it all, to understand it, but I must start somewhere, so I try to deal with the giant water bug in Tinker Creek and the flight of three hundred redwings from an Osage orange and let those who dare worry about the birthrate and population explosion among solar systems. So I think about the valley. And it occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous. The giant water bug’s predations, the frog’s croak, the tree with the lights in it are not in any real sense necessary per se to the world or its creator. Nor am I. The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity for which I would die, and I shall. The point about that being, as I know it here and see it, is that as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae. The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible fact about creation. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, then look at the trees; when you’ve looked at enough trees, you’ve seen a forest, you’ve got it. If the world is gratuitous, then the fringe of a goldfish’s fin is a million times more so. The first question- the one crucial one- of the creation of the universe and the existence of something as a sign and an affront to nothing is a blank one…The old Kabbalistic phrase is “the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.” The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter; they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy then is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.

~ Annie Dillard

So how did you think about him?” Rachel asks.Hallelujah shrugs. “We were friends. Good friends. He knew—knows—a lot about me. I guess I know a lot about him. Stuff he likes and doesn’t like.”Rachel looks skeptical. “And yet you never knew he liked you.”“No! I mean—when Jonah and I were friends, I liked Luke. So maybe I missed some signs.”“So you just . . . hung out? Platonically?”“Yeah. I guess.” Hallelujah thinks about how to explain it. How to distill a friendship down to its most basic components. “We had choir together last year. We talked. For kind of the first time, even though we’d been in church and school together since fourth grade.”“And, what, you found out you had so much in common?”“Actually, no. But we started comparing music we liked, and a month into ninth grade, Jonah made me this mix of songs. Based on what we’d talked about. So then I made him a mix. And it grew from there. We’d go to each other’s houses, watch movies, listen to music, that kind of thing. Hanging out.”“So tell me about Jonah. Something only you know.”“Um. He’d probably deny it, but he got really into the Harry Potter books. Like, really into them. I loaned him my box set last spring. He got so mad at me for not warning him how Book Six ends.”Rachel laughs. “He didn’t see the movies?”“No. But I told him we couldn’t watch them until he’d finished the books.

~ Kathryn Holmes

There’s a little tagline in there that I throw out to our fans, I like to call them my sinners, and I’m a fellow sinner, and so I think that’s a special little throw-out to them.

~ Brendon Urie

After a few minutes, she speaks up again. “You’re next. Sing.”Anxiety grips Hallelujah’s chest, squeezing. “I don’t sing,” she says.“C’mon, it doesn’t matter if you’re bad. It’s not like this is a concert hall—”“She’s not bad.” Jonah’s back. “She has a great voice.”Rachel swings around to look from Jonah to Hallelujah. “Really? Now you have to—”“No.“But—”“I don’t sing,” Hallelujah repeats, turning away.Jonah joins them by the fire. The silence stretches out. Except it’s not really silent, not with the birds and wind and fire and how loud Hallelujah’s heart is beating. And then Jonah clears his throat. “You used to sing,” he says. “You were great.”Hallelujah ignores the compliment. She looks into the fire. She feels the last of the day’s happiness fading away, already a memory.“Why’d you quit?” Jonah asks. “Was it ’cause of Luke?”Hallelujah inhales deeply. She feels the familiar spark of anger in her gut. “Yes,” she says. “It was because of Luke. And you. And everyone else. So thanks for that.” Jonah’s face drops. She can see that she’s hit a nerve. Well, he hurt her first. The way he took Luke’s side, shutting her out. The loss of his friendship, when she needed a friend most. The loss of their voices harmonizing, when she needed music most. How she just hurt him can’t begin to compare to all of that.

~ Kathryn Holmes

I hate him.” She repeats it louder. “I hate him!” She shouts it at the sky, even though it’s hard to shout lying down: “I! Hate! Luke! Willis!”Rachel asks, “But what did he do?”Hallelujah can hear Jonah waiting for her answer. She knows he’s waiting because he’s stopped making fire-building noises. He’s silent. Completely.She takes a deep breath. “He told a lie about me. Actually, a lot of lies. And people believed him. The grown-ups, because he’s the preacher’s son and he’d never do something bad. And everyone our age—because he’s popular and you don’t question the popular guy, because if you do, you’ll stop being popular yourself. Or you’ll never get the chance. And because of what he said, my parents stopped trusting me. I lost friends. I was just this loser who—”She breaks off. Now she’s talking to Jonah. Even though he’s behind her and she can’t see him. “It doesn’t matter what you saw that night, or what he told you happened. Luke treated me like I was nothing, and you let him do it.”Jonah doesn’t answer.“But that’s not what makes me the maddest,” Hallelujah continues, pushing up to sit. “What makes me the maddest is that I let it happen too. I didn’t stand up for myself. And when someone did tell me to stand up for myself, I got so mad—”Sarah. She feels the emotion of their argument wash over her, fresh.“I pushed her away. I told her she didn’t understand anything. But she was right. I became this girl who wouldn’t stand up for herself. The quiet girl. The nothing girl. I just wanted it all to stop, but from the outside, without me having to make it stop. And I wanted to get away, but I figured, hey, college will get here eventually and then I’ll be away, I just have to get there, and all the while I’m miserable, and I’m letting you guys make me miserable, letting you make me think I’m supposed to be miserable, that I’m supposed to be quiet, and I’m shutting people out, people who maybe actually care, and I hate myself for it.” An abrupt stop. The train of thought hits a wall.She’s never said that before. Never thought it before. Not consciously.But she knows, deeper than she’s ever known anything, that it’s true.Hallelujah has spent six months hating herself for being weak and silent and for letting bad things happen and for not fighting.

~ Kathryn Holmes

He’s looking at her with so much compassion. Like he knows what she’s going through. Like he cares about her. This is what she wanted to see after everything happened with Luke. Instead, she saw Jonah’s back, every time he turned and walked away from her.She blurts, “Why are you being nice to me?She regrets it immediately. It’s the vulnerability talking. The fear. The adrenaline. For a second, she forgot the aloof, thick-skinned Hallelujah she needs to be.Jonah relaxes his grip. He looks away, out into the wet woods. He waits a long time before speaking. “Luke told me.”Hallelujah is instantly tense. “Luke told you what?”Another long pause. “That he lied. About what happened that night.”“What happened?” Rachel cuts in. “What’d Luke lie about?”Hallelujah ignores her. She stays focused on Jonah, even though he won’t look at her. “What’d he tell you originally?”Jonah flinches. “He made it . . . worse. Than what he told the adults. He said that that wasn’t the first time. And he said that you—”“Never mind,” Hallelujah cuts in. “I can guess.” She’s heard the rumors. The persistent ones and the surprising, weird, creative ones. She bets there are a lot that she hasn’t heard, too. “None of that happened,” she says softly but firmly, certain without even knowing exactly what Luke said. What Jonah heard. “None of it.”“That’s what he told me yesterday. I wanted to know why he was still—” He swallows, his Adam’s apple moving up and down. “I’d heard him and Brad laughing about what they were gonna do to you this week, and I was like, enough is enough. Time to let it go. So I asked him what was up. Why he was still messing with you.”“And?” Hallelujah asks.“And he told me the truth: that he’d made most of it up. He said he had to keep you quiet. Plus, um. He said messing with you was fun.”Hallelujah lets that sink in. “You really didn’t know it was a lie? You believed him this whole time?”Jonah suddenly looks right at her. His eyes plead. “I saw you, Hallie. And Luke was the only one of the two of you with a story to explain it.

~ Kathryn Holmes

She used to think alone was the answer. Alone would stop the whispers and the taunts. Alone couldn't get her into any more trouble. Alone meant not getting hurt. Now, she'd give anything to see another human being. To hear someone call her name

~ Kathryn Holmes

Jonah is something. Jonah’s opinion matters. And she doesn’t want him to hurt because of her.She and Jonah will never be what they were. Too much has happened. But maybe they could become something else.She decides to take the first step. “Jonah,” she says.He looks over at her. “I’m sorry,” he says, voice low.“Don’t be. I forgive you,” she tells him. It sounds so formal. I forgive you. But it helps to say it out loud.“Thanks. I don’t know if I deserve that. But thanks.”“You do. Of course you do.” Hallelujah says it firmly. “And—I want to.” I’ve missed you, she adds silently. She’s not ready to say that part. Not yet.

~ Kathryn Holmes

Jonah shifts to lean back a little farther, moaning as he does. “Holy heck, my leg hurts,” he says, still with that strained, forced lightness.Again, Hallelujah mimics his tone. “‘Holy heck’? That’s cutting it close.”“I have a gash in my leg the size of the Mississippi. I can say whatever I want.

~ Kathryn Holmes

Are you hurt?” the woman asks.“Just my—” Even after the water, her voice comes out as a dry hiss. She clears her throat and tries again. “Just my ankle.”“Can you tell us where the others are? Are they . . . ?” Charlie fades off, but she knows how the question ends.“They’re still out there. Still alive.” Hallelujah will not think about the alternative. But by not trying not to think about it, she’s thinking about it, and it’s making her feel panicky. “I was the only one who could walk, so I—” She gulps. Draws in a shaky breath.Charlie dismounts his bike and squats down next to her. “Go on,” he says. His voice is soft. His accent is southern. But not hillbilly southern. Deep South. He’s not from around here either.She can’t believe her mind is wandering like this. She tries to focus.“We found—Jonah found a trail, and I followed it to this road. They’re at a campsite by the trail. I . . .” Hallelujah falters. “I don’t know how far. I wasn’t walking very fast. We haven’t eaten in . . . a while. And Rachel—she’s sick. She was throwing up. And Jonah cut his leg and it wouldn’t stop bleeding. . . .”“Jesus,” the woman says.

~ Kathryn Holmes

Hallelujah songcarries on a gentle wind,heralding a king.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

So what was Jonah like before high school? As a kid?”“As a kid?” Hallelujah brings up the picture in her mind. “He was . . . sweet, I guess. Dorky. He’d wear these outfits his mom picked out—pleated khaki pants and polo shirts, with his hair slicked down with gel. And he would get really enthusiastic about things. Too enthusiastic. He went through this cowboy phase where he wore a cowboy hat and boots to school every day. Didn’t care what anyone thought.” The mental image makes her smile.“And he and Luke were best friends?”“Starting in middle school, yeah. They played soccer together.”“Huh.” Rachel pauses. “So when did Jonah get cute?”“He was still pretty short in middle school. And skinny. But he did start dressing better.”“No more pleated khakis?”“No more pleated khakis. And then the summer before ninth grade, he had this growth spurt. And he started to, uh, fill out. So I guess ninth grade is when I noticed . . .” Hallelujah fades off. “This is embarrassing.”“No, it’s not. This is what girls talk about.” Rachel grins. “Besides. I wanted to see if you were paying as close attention to him as he was to you.”“I didn’t realize I was. We were just friends.”“You can be friends and still objectively notice someone’s cuteness.

~ Kathryn Holmes

Hallelujah can barely breathe through the pain of each step. Rachel is panting from the effort of holding Hallelujah up. Still, when they get closer to the clearing, Rachel manages to call out: “Jonah! Help!”There’s a rustling noise up ahead. Twigs snapping. And then Jonah appears. His face is in shadow, but his voice is worried: “What happened?”“I turned my ankle,” Hallelujah says. “I’m okay.”“She’s not okay,” Rachel gasps. “She can’t put weight on it. Can you carry her?”Jonah doesn’t hesitate. He wraps one arm around Hallelujah’s waist, and then he scoops up her legs with the other. In a single, fluid motion, she’s off the ground. She holds on to his shoulders. For a second, she thinks about how strange this is—to be held like this, to be held by Jonah.

~ Kathryn Holmes

Jonah’s hair sprays water each time he flips around, in search of another fish. Droplets shimmer on his skin. He’s really cute. And Hallelujah can’t help but think about last night. About him liking her. He flashes her a smile, and something inside her swoons.

~ Kathryn Holmes