Sunday, May 18, 2008

One True Thing by Anna Quindlen

  • They knew everything about what was going on in their little world.
  • I listened to her, because I loved her.
  • I hadn't known how good it was to live so normally, so everyday. But you only know that, I suppose, after it's not normal and everyday any longer.
  • If you are different from a person everyone agrees is wonderful, it means you are somehow wrong.
  • She should never be disappointed by failure because failure was all you could expect.
  • The important thing is that I'm all right.
  • I'd read for hours. I think in the back of my mind I thought it would be a substitute for not going to college.
  • It's a mistake to base your entire life on one man's approval.
  • I don't have the energy for anger.
  • I'm the kind of person who likes to know things.
  • It's the weak link in just about every book I've ever read. They set up a very smart, very thoughtful, very nice character, and then have him fall in love with someone that anyone could tell is a horrible human being.
  • She was not yet ready to let her child be the grown-up in the house. She had had one great calling, as a mother, and she would not be forced from the field.
  • There's no such thing as being too hard on yourself.
  • Thank you for the world so sweet, thank you for the food we eat, thank you for the birds that sing, thank you, God, for everything.
  • Everyone deals with bad stuff in their own way.
  • Why should she have to sit by herself and look at pictures of her life when she could have the real thing? Why should she sit around conjuring up her memories of your life together when she could be with you making real memories?
  • Sometimes people need to hear things said out loud before they become real.
  • I have the right to be treated as a living human being until I die.
  • We cry to give voice to our pain.
  • I refuse to believe that keeping your grief bottled up makes you feel better than crying.
  • It's more important that you take advantage of the time you have than that you worry about how much time there is.
  • There is no good way to tell people that they are lucky in their relationships.
  • You make concessions when you're married a long time that you don't believe you'll ever make when you're beginning. You say to yourself when you're young, oh, I wouldn't tolerate this or that or the other thing, you say love is the most important thing in the world and there's only one kind of love and it makes you feel different than you feel the rest of the time, like you're all lit up. But time goes by and you've slept together a thousand nights and smelled like spit up when babies are sick and seen your body droop and get soft. And some nights you say to yourself, it's not enough, I won't put up with another minute. And then the next morning you wake up and the kitchen smells like coffee and the children have their hair all brushed and the birds are eating out of the feeder and you look at your husband and he's not the person you used to think he was but he's your life. The house and the children and so much of what you do is built around him and your life, too, your history. If you take him out it's like cutting his face out of all pictures, there's a big hole and it's ugly. It would ruin everything. It's more than love, it's more important than love.
  • You can be hard, and you can be judgmental, and with those two things alone you can make a mess of your life the likes of which you won't believe.
  • All the things we don't say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble. I want to talk before I die. I want to be the one who gets to say things, who gets to think the deep thoughts.
  • It's so much easier, to learn to love what you have instead of yearning always for what you're missing, or what you imagine you're missing. It's so much more peaceful.
  • There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.
  • A good housewife makes a happy home.
  • Second-rate poetry is better than no poetry at all.
  • Knowing that you're typical doesn't go a long way toward making you feel better in your day-to-day life.
  • It takes your entire life to get over some of the people you've loved, and some you never get over.
  • If your cat is up a tree, then you want to be nice to police officers. If you are under suspicion in a murder case, you do not. They are on the other side. They are not interested in the search for truth. They are interested in the search for you.
  • Everyone makes up their little stories and then they wonder why their own lives aren't like that. It makes life so much simpler if they can get rid of all the loose ends.
  • I just want to feel something.
  • Wasn't your image of your father always just refracted through your mother's belief in what he was? Wasn't he really just her creation?
  • Be just, and fear not.
  • Authority must earn the right to lead, and we owe ourselves the right to refuse to follow if they do not.
  • It's so much easier to know just how you feel about things, what you believe, when you're writing it on paper than when you really have to do anything about it or live with it.
  • It's all anyone wants, really, to make life simple.
  • Death is so strange, so mysterious, so sad, that we want to blame someone for it.
  • I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.
  • Have you ever had the feeling that you had things all figured out and then suddenly you find yourself back to square one?

2/15/2007

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