Vanishing Acts

'If you want something to be true badly enough, you can rewrite it that way, in your head.  You can even start to believe it.'

'It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it, and the one who believes it.'

'Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.'

'You make yourself strong because it's expected of you. You become confident because someone beside you is unsure. You turn into the person others need you to be.'

'You can't exist in this world without leaving a piece of yourself behind.'

'It took me a lifetime to realize things don't get lost if they don't have value- you don't miss what you don't care about.'

'There are two kinds of love...in the safe kind you look for someone who's exactly like you. It's what most folks settle for. But then there's the other kind of love. Everyone's born with a ragged edge, and some folks crave that piece that's a perfect fit. You'll search for it forever, if you have to. And if you're lucky enough to find it, it looks so right, you start to tear at your own seams, thinking, maybe I could look just as perfect. But then, of course, when you try to get close to their other half, you don't fit anymore. That kind of love...you come out of it a different person than you were when you started.'

'Just because you keep something a secret doesn't mean it never happened, no matter how much you want that to be true.'

'It's choice that makes us human.'

'What is right, in the end, is not always what it seems to be, and some rules are better broken.'

'The truth was, history repeated itself on a daily basis; mistakes were made over and over.  People were haunted by what they had done, and by what they hadn't had time to do.'

'You can't edit a blank page.'

'Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow- beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.'

'Sometimes there aren't words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him.'

'Change is a funny thing. We never are quite sure what we are becoming or even why. Then one day we look at ourselves and wonder who we are and how we got that way. Only one thing about change remains constant...it is always painful.'

'If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask... with nothing beneath it?'

'The damage was permanent; there would always be scars.  But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been.'

'Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who do you blame when something goes wrong.'

'I've always sort of wondered: If everyone else's opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?'

'Sometimes, when you don't ask questions, it's not because you are afraid that someone will lie to your face.  It's because you're afraid they'll tell you the truth.'
'What if it turns out that a life isn't defined by who you belong to or where you came from, by what you wished for or whom you've lost, but instead by the moments you spend getting from each of these places to the next?'

'Is Fate getting what you deserve, or deserving what you get?'

'You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.'

'Who I am, and what I am capable of doing has always managed to surprise me.'

'I could tell her from personal experience that when people we love make choices we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness. But all this took me a lifetime to discover, and where has it gotten me?'

'I understand better than she'd imagine that history is indelible. You can mask it; you can patch it smooth and clear; but you always know what's hidden underneath.'

'How can you be a survivor, when you can't even remember the war?'

'I don't know why it's called "getting lost."  Even when you turn down the wrong street, when you find yourself at the dead end of a chain-link fence or a road that turned to sand, you are somewhere.  It just isn't where you expected to be.'

'Sometimes we find ourselves walking through life blindfolded, and we try to deny that we're the ones who securely tied the knot.'

'If you choose to be looking for something, you'd better be ready for whatever it is you are find. Because it may not be what you've been expecting.'

'If you had grown up with me, this is one of the things I would have tried to teach you: Marry a man who loves you more than you love him. Because I have both now, and when it is the other way around, there is no spell in the world that can even out the balance.'

'Love is not an equation... It is not a contract, and it's not a happy ending. It is the slate under the chalk and the ground buildings rise from and the oxygen in the air.'

'You can boil your life down to a single suitcase, if you desperately have to. Ask yourself what you really need, and it won't be what you imagine - you will easily toss aside unfinished work, and bills, and your daily calendar to make room for the pair of flannel pajamas you wear when it rains; and the stone your child gave you that is shaped like a heart; and the battered paperback you revisit every April because it was what you were reading the first time you fell in love. It turns out that what's important is not everything that you've accumulated all these years, but those few things you can carry with you.'

'I would figure out, later, how to explain to my boss that, for me, Delia will never be a story, but a happy ending.'

'When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again; yet after giving birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external...'

'There are some things, I think, you're better off not remembering.'

'It it strange, suddenly having a memory come back out of nowhere. You think you're going crazy; you wonder where this recollection has been hiding all your life. You try to push it away, because you think you've hammered out the whole timeline of your life, but then you see that one extra moment, and suddenly you are breaking apart what you though was a solid segment, and seeing it for what it is: just a string of events, shoulder to shoulder, and a gap where there is room for one more.'

'We make messes of our lives, but every now and then, we manage to do something that's exactly right. The challenge is figuring out which is which.'

'It is strange to think that we might have crossed paths, and still not have known what we were missing.'

'There is a fine line between seeing something that's lost as missing, and seeing it as something that might be found.'

'You can widen the feet of a compass, but they are still attached at the top; you can spin them away from each other, but you always wind up where you started.'

'No one gets to start where they left off; it just doesn't work that way.'

'Whether it is conscious or not, you eventually make the decision to divide your life in half - before and after - with loss being that tight bubble in the middle. You can move around in spite of it; you can laugh and smile and carry on with your life, but all it takes is one slow range of motion, a doubling over, to be fully aware of the empty space at your center.'

'For someone who can't remember very much, there seems to be a lot I can't forget.'

'Why do some memories bleed out of nowhere and others stay locked behind doors?'

'Not everyone understands how you can spin two lassos at the same time, one of hope and one of grief.'

'It was the first time she'd discovered something she really didn't want to find, and she didn't know what to do once she'd found it.'

'The only way someone can leave you is if you let them.'

'That's the strange thing about being a mother: until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one.'

'For God's sake, if I learned anything during this damn trial it's that the only way someone can leave you is if you let them. And I'm not doing that, Dee. It may look like that today, or tomorrow, or even a month from now, but one day you're going to wake up and see that this whole time you've been gone, you've only been headed back to where you started. And I'll be there, waiting.' He leans forward and kisses me once, feather-light, on the lips. 'It's not like I'm not letting you go,' he murmurs. 'I'm just trusting you enough to come back.'

'Sometimes, I think my whole life has been about holding onto you.'

'When your mother is made out of your dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you.'

'Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't stand the thought of them changing? Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't see clearly?'

'Elise Vasquez and I stand shoulder to shoulder, watching the woman we both feel we lost, and may be never really had.'

'Eric understands that the world is rarely the way it is supposed to be. And he knows that, given the chance, we don't have to wait for someone to make messes of our lives. We do a good enough job, ourselves.'

'Sometimes we don't know we're dreaming; we can't even fathom that we're asleep.'

'How do you walk into someone's life again after twenty-eight years? How do you pick up, when you were too young to know where you left off.'

'In half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn't: my past.'

'Neither of us, it turns out, has been the only one who lost someone she loved.'

'Memories aren't stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.'

'Life is not a plot; it's in the details.'

'Suddenly this is all too hard. I am tired of putting up walls. I want someone with the strength - and the honesty - to break them down.'

'What could you give me,' I ask, my voice shaking, 'to make me forget ... that you forgot about me?'

'Do you ever go back?' Ruthann nods, 'When I need to remember where I came from, or where I'm headed.'

'If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It's new, even to me.'

'...when they look at me, I so badly want to be who they see.'

'When you're a parent you find yourself looking at the unknown that is your child, trying to find a piece of yourself inside her, because sometimes that is what it takes to claim. Sometimes parents don't find what they're looking for it their child, so they plant seeds for what they'd like to grow there instead. I've witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son out to skate before he can even walk. Or in the mother who gave up her ballet dreams when she married, but now scrapes her daughter's hair into a bun and watched from the wings of the stage. We are not, as you'd expect, orchestrating their lives; we are not even trying for a second chance. We are hoping that if this one thing takes root, it might take up enough light and space to keep something else from developing in our children: the disappointment we've already lived.'

'Sometimes knowing what's right isn't a rational decision, or even what works on paper. Sometimes leaving is the best course of action after all.'

'That's the crazy thing about lies. You start to fall for them, yourself.'

'You can't hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.'

'I would tell them that when you look at a person, you never know what the're hiding.'

'We sit for a few more moments, although there's really nothing left to say. This is new to me, too, an entire 
conversation that takes place in silence, because the heart has its own language. I will remember what Eric says even though he doesn't say a word. I will tell it to her.'

'Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask... with nothing beneath it?

I've always sort of wondered: If everyone else's opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?

As a child, what I was missing was so much bigger to me than what I had.  My mother-mythic, imaginary-was a deity and a superhero and a comfort all at once.  If only I'd had her, surely, she would have been the answer to every problem; if only I'd had her , she would have been the cure for everything that ever had gone wrong in my life.

When you don't know where you're headed, you find places no one else would ever explore.

What is right, in the end, is not always what it seems to be, and some rules are better broken.