-) That's what happens to dreams, life gets in the way.
-) All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here.
-) I always hated when my scars started to fade, because as long as I could still see them, I knew why I was hurting.
-) Things that break - be they bones, hearts, or promises - can be put back together but will never really be whole.
-) Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was
-) Parents aren't the people you come from. They're the people you want to be, when you grow up
-) I sat between my mother and my father, watching strangers on TV carry in Shaker rockers and dusty paintings and ancient beer tankards and cranberry glass dishes; people and their hidden treasures, who had to be told by experts that they'd taken something incredibly precious for granted.
-) People ask all the time how I'm doing, but the truth is, they don't really want to know.
-) When you showed someone how you felt, it was fesh and honest. Whe you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation. Those three words were what everyone used.
-) When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.
-) Until then I never understood why you didn't cry, even though it hurt: there are kinds of pain you couldn't speak out loud.
-) It was one thing to make a mistake; it was another thing to keep making it.
-) I knew what happened when you let yourself get close to someone, when you started to believe they loved you: you'd be disappointed. Depend on someone, and you might as well admit you're going to be crushed, because when you really needed them, they wouldn't be there. Either that, or you'd confide in them and you added to their problems.
-) All you ever really had was yourself, and that sort of sucked if you were less than reliable.
-) People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that's not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.
-) Families were never what you wanted them to be. We all wanted what we couldn't have: the perfect child, the doting husband, the mother who wouldn't let go. We live in our grown-up dollhouses completely unaware that, at any moment, a hand might come in and change around everything we'd become accustomed to.
-) What looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.
-) Just because you didn't put a name to something did not mean it wasn't there.
-) Doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.
-) What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand.
-) Maybe you expected marriage to be perfect - I guess that's where you and I are different. See, I thought it would be all about making mistakes, but doing it with someone who's there to remind you what you learned along the way.
-) When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance.
-) A dutiful mother is someone who follows every step her child makes...And a good mother is someone whose child wants to follow her.
-) It felt like I'd been living underground, and for a moment, I'd been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you've seen that, how can you go back where you came from?
-) Maybe I was naive to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything.
-) I had always been suspicious of women who described the dissolution of their marriages as something that happened overnight. How could you not know? I'd thought. How could you miss all those signs? Well, let me tell you how: you were so busy putting out a fire directly in front of you that you were completely oblivious to the inferno raging at your back.
-) Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late we've wounded the people we're trying to protect.
-) Even though it hurt, there are kinds of pain you couldn't speak out loud.
-) Things break all the time. Glass and dishes and fingernails. Cars and contracts and potato chips. You can break a record, a horse, a dollar. You can break the ice. There are coffee breaks and lunch breaks and prison breaks. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Chains can be broken. So can silence, and fever... promises break. Hearts break.
-) Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother?
Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.
-) I wondered about the explorers who'd sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams.
-) Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.
-) Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?
-) Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest--like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn't noticed--weren't sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward.
-) If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were I'm sorry.
-) What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.
-) But I had forgotten, that the best defense is a good offense.
-) It was one thing to sacrifice your own life for someone else's. It was another thing entirely to bring into the mix a third party - a third party who knew you, who trusted you implicitly.
-) I've written and rewritten this, read and reread it. It's not perfect, and neither am I. But I'm finally brave, and I'd like to think that maybe I inherited that from you.
-) If I didn't ask for anything, I didn't have to hear them say no.
-) Part of growing up was distancing yourself from your mother.
-) "Willow," I said slowly. "Your mother didn't ask you to pay for that wheel."
"No, but if it doesn't cost her any extra, she won't have to get rid of me."
-) It didn't matter to me how that happened - just as long as it did. I wasn't thinking of who I might hurt, only who I could rescue.
-) What I could never puzzle out, however, was how you'd get from where you are to where you might be one day - until I was given the materials to make a bridge. Too late I learned that that bridge was made of thorns, that it might not be strong enough to hold us all.
-) Maybe that makes me a pessimist, maybe it makes me a realist. Or maybe it just makes me a mother.
-) That world of yours, its so gray you can't see the landmarks anymore. You don't know where you are headed.
-) ...and the very act of remembering involves choosing word and phrases and images.
-) If you chose to stop a loved one's suffering - either before it began or during the process - was that murder, or mercy?
-) A lot of zeroes didn't mean anything, really, except security.
-) There is no cosmic scale on which you can weigh your actions; you learn too late what choices ruin the fragile balance.
-) But love wasn't about sacrifice, and it wasn't about falling short of someone' expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redeemed perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them.
-) I hated that I had to pretend I knew, when in reality, it had already faded, like a rose you press into a distionary in the Qs, hoping you can call back summer at any time, but then in December it's nothing more than crumbling, brown bits of dried flower.
-) All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here.
-) I always hated when my scars started to fade, because as long as I could still see them, I knew why I was hurting.
-) Things that break - be they bones, hearts, or promises - can be put back together but will never really be whole.
-) Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was
-) Parents aren't the people you come from. They're the people you want to be, when you grow up
-) I sat between my mother and my father, watching strangers on TV carry in Shaker rockers and dusty paintings and ancient beer tankards and cranberry glass dishes; people and their hidden treasures, who had to be told by experts that they'd taken something incredibly precious for granted.
-) People ask all the time how I'm doing, but the truth is, they don't really want to know.
-) When you showed someone how you felt, it was fesh and honest. Whe you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation. Those three words were what everyone used.
-) When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.
-) Until then I never understood why you didn't cry, even though it hurt: there are kinds of pain you couldn't speak out loud.
-) It was one thing to make a mistake; it was another thing to keep making it.
-) I knew what happened when you let yourself get close to someone, when you started to believe they loved you: you'd be disappointed. Depend on someone, and you might as well admit you're going to be crushed, because when you really needed them, they wouldn't be there. Either that, or you'd confide in them and you added to their problems.
-) All you ever really had was yourself, and that sort of sucked if you were less than reliable.
-) People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that's not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.
-) Families were never what you wanted them to be. We all wanted what we couldn't have: the perfect child, the doting husband, the mother who wouldn't let go. We live in our grown-up dollhouses completely unaware that, at any moment, a hand might come in and change around everything we'd become accustomed to.
-) What looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.
-) Just because you didn't put a name to something did not mean it wasn't there.
-) Doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.
-) What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand.
-) Maybe you expected marriage to be perfect - I guess that's where you and I are different. See, I thought it would be all about making mistakes, but doing it with someone who's there to remind you what you learned along the way.
-) When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance.
-) A dutiful mother is someone who follows every step her child makes...And a good mother is someone whose child wants to follow her.
-) It felt like I'd been living underground, and for a moment, I'd been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you've seen that, how can you go back where you came from?
-) Maybe I was naive to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything.
-) I had always been suspicious of women who described the dissolution of their marriages as something that happened overnight. How could you not know? I'd thought. How could you miss all those signs? Well, let me tell you how: you were so busy putting out a fire directly in front of you that you were completely oblivious to the inferno raging at your back.
-) Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late we've wounded the people we're trying to protect.
-) Even though it hurt, there are kinds of pain you couldn't speak out loud.
-) Things break all the time. Glass and dishes and fingernails. Cars and contracts and potato chips. You can break a record, a horse, a dollar. You can break the ice. There are coffee breaks and lunch breaks and prison breaks. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Chains can be broken. So can silence, and fever... promises break. Hearts break.
-) Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother?
Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.
-) I wondered about the explorers who'd sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams.
-) Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.
-) Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?
-) Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest--like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn't noticed--weren't sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward.
-) If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were I'm sorry.
-) What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.
-) But I had forgotten, that the best defense is a good offense.
-) It was one thing to sacrifice your own life for someone else's. It was another thing entirely to bring into the mix a third party - a third party who knew you, who trusted you implicitly.
-) I've written and rewritten this, read and reread it. It's not perfect, and neither am I. But I'm finally brave, and I'd like to think that maybe I inherited that from you.
-) If I didn't ask for anything, I didn't have to hear them say no.
-) Part of growing up was distancing yourself from your mother.
-) "Willow," I said slowly. "Your mother didn't ask you to pay for that wheel."
"No, but if it doesn't cost her any extra, she won't have to get rid of me."
-) It didn't matter to me how that happened - just as long as it did. I wasn't thinking of who I might hurt, only who I could rescue.
-) What I could never puzzle out, however, was how you'd get from where you are to where you might be one day - until I was given the materials to make a bridge. Too late I learned that that bridge was made of thorns, that it might not be strong enough to hold us all.
-) Maybe that makes me a pessimist, maybe it makes me a realist. Or maybe it just makes me a mother.
-) That world of yours, its so gray you can't see the landmarks anymore. You don't know where you are headed.
-) ...and the very act of remembering involves choosing word and phrases and images.
-) If you chose to stop a loved one's suffering - either before it began or during the process - was that murder, or mercy?
-) A lot of zeroes didn't mean anything, really, except security.
-) There is no cosmic scale on which you can weigh your actions; you learn too late what choices ruin the fragile balance.
-) But love wasn't about sacrifice, and it wasn't about falling short of someone' expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redeemed perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them.
-) I hated that I had to pretend I knew, when in reality, it had already faded, like a rose you press into a distionary in the Qs, hoping you can call back summer at any time, but then in December it's nothing more than crumbling, brown bits of dried flower.
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