She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb

• Daddy's anger had left her far away and careless
• My parents' fights just meant they loved each other in a noisy way.
• I had assumed men were as incapable of crying as they were of having babies.
• The smile you send out returns to you.
• Idle please disguises itself as permanent happiness.
• I wondered if the whole world wasn't crazy.
• The sanctity of the confessional applied more to murderers than kids.
• That's what life's all about. Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.
• You cook your own goose when you limit yourself.
• You can be two things if you are a woman. Betty Crocker or a floozy. Just remember your place--even if it kills you.
• Don't you ever become some man's personal toilet.
• He was always full of promises. He had wrecked my whole life.
• I'm not your free show!
• Teachers! There were two types: the ones who treated you like dirt and the ones who were all over you with their Geiger counters of hope.
• All the dead bolts and pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.
• I usually learn more from the situations I hate than the ones I love.
• They assumed they were better than you just because they knew their own routine.
• You were the same person, no matter what state you happened to be stuck breathing in.
• Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
• I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.
• If you played with fire, you were going to get burned.
• It was funny how my high-school education was turning out to be more useful after the fact than while they were putting me through it.
• Everything's relative. Look at the big picture.
• We owe it to our generation to get political!
• Pain would be better than not feeling anything.
• God has his reasons that you and me don't understand.
• I wanted to talk to someone, some person I hadn't failed.
• I tried to recall any other time when he had apologized to me. For over three years it had been the other way around.
• Disagreements don't alter a mother's love for her daughter. Nothing does. Nothing alters that.
• The trouble with going underwater was that you had to come back up.
• The whole world was crazy; I'd flattered myself by assuming I was a semifinalist.
• Who was I to criticize someone else's choices? Who was I to judge?
• I don't see it as a matter of choice. Your feelings are facts.
• You create your own future.
• You build happiness out of insight and good habits.
• Show me a childhood without some sort of violence. Show me a painless childhood.
• You orchestrate happiness--you work at it. You don't catch it as it hurls toward you like a football.
• I want to live in a place where I can have a bedroom-door lock. Where I can be my real age and not have to pretend some man is my mother.
• Fate doesn't give warranties like Sears Roebuck.
• If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.
• I wondered if I hadn't made a crucial mistake, obvious to everyone but me.
• You didn't telephone people if your new life was working out.
• Different strokes for different folks.
• Everyone in the world kept secrets.
• But the Lord Almight doesn't give out any promises just because you love someone. Love only gets you so far.
• If you risked love, it took you wherever you wanted to go. If you repressed it, you ended up unhappy like Grandma.
• Repression doesn't make it any easier. It just wastes energy.
• Foul language is part of your armor of defense.
• Not using birth control was a decision to have a baby.
• Men scare too easily.
• Without the pictures seducing you, TV was just a powerless talking ghost.
• Being complimented felt the same as being accused.
• No couple is happy all the time.
• Writing is a lot like dreaming. There's a subconscious connection. Once someone intrudes, it's like trying to go back to sleep to finish your dream.
• His words had burned me more times than they'd soothed me. I cautioned myself not to be taken in by this verbal Noxzema.
• Death angered loved ones because it made them feel powerless.
• You sit around feelin' sorry for yourself and you're dead. Sittin' on your ass can get to be a disease worse than what you got.
• Life's a shit sandwich, but only if you're a shithead.
• People don't fall so neatly into the categories you put them in--heroes and villains, unfettered and--fettered?
• You just shouldn't make promises you don't intend to keep.
• The whole world would work right if people just tried being an inch and a half nicer to each other.
• My whole life used to throb like a toothache.
• The secret is to just settle for the shape your life takes. Instead of, you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.
• Life's absurd. Live authentically. Stop whining.
• Love was always the thing that did that--smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.
• Good catches are a mixed blessing.
• I just don't believe in happily-ever-after. It's a crock of shit! I know it's a crock of shit. I ain't offering you happily-ever-after. I'm offering you...happily-maybe-sometimes-ever-after. Sort of. You know, with warts and shit.
• People waste their happiness--that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to be happy.
• Accept what people offer. Take their love.
• Love is like breathing. You take it in and let it out.
• Whatever prices I've paid, whatever sorrows I shoulder, well, I have blessings, too.

12/19/2006