Deb Caletti > Quotes

“That's what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you're not so lovable.”
― Deb Caletti

“It made me wonder how many times we forgive just because we don't want to lose someone, even if they don't deserve our forgiveness.”
― Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

“Sometimes love is a surprise, an instant of recognition, a sudden gift at a sudden moment that makes everything different from then on. Some people will say that's not love, that you can't really love someone you don't know. But, I'm not so sure. Love doesn't seem to follow a plan; it's not a series of steps. It can hit with the force of nature--an earthquake, a tidal wave, a storm of wild relentless energy that is beyond your simple attempts at control.”
― Deb Caletti

“We are all a volume on a shelf of a library, a story unto ourselves, never possibly described with one word or even very accurately with thousands. A person is never as quiet or unrestrained as they seem, or as bad or good, as vulnerable or as strong, as sweet or as fiesty; we are thickly layered, page upon lying page, behind simple covers. And love - it is not the book itself, but the binding. It can rip us apart or hold us together.”
― Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

“I shouldn't have to be a liar to make someone love me. I shouldn't be so afraid of losing someone that I'll do anything to make them stay.”
― Deb Caletti, The Six Rules of Maybe

“It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn't have something in the first place. I guess that's what disappointment is- a sense of loss for something you never had.”
― Deb Caletti, The Nature of Jade

“The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all.”
― Deb Caletti, The Fortunes of Indigo Skye

“This is what I know. Don't settle for 40, 50, or even 80 percent. A relationship-it shouldn't be too small or too tight or even a little scratchy. It shouldn't take up space in your closet out of guilty conscience or convenience or a moment of desire. Do you hear me? It shold be perfect for you. It should be lasting. Wait. wait for 100 percent.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“It starts so young, and I'm angry about that. The garbage we're taught. About love, about what's "romantic." Look at so many of the so-called romantic figures in books and movies. Do we ever stop and think how many of them would cause serious and drastic unhappiness after The End? Why are sick and dangerous personality types so often shown a passionate and tragic and something to be longed for when those are the very ones you should run for your life from? Think about it. Heathcliff. Romeo. Don Juan. Jay Gatsby. Rochester. Mr. Darcy. From the rigid control freak in The Sound of Music to all the bad boys some woman goes running to the airport to catch in the last minute of every romantic comedy. She should let him leave. Your time is so valuable, and look at these guys--depressive and moody and violent and immature and self-centered. And what about the big daddy of them all, Prince Charming? What was his secret life? We dont know anything about him, other then he looks good and comes to the rescue.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“I guess forgiveness, like happiness, isn’t a final destination. You don’t one day get there and get to stay.”
― Deb Caletti

“You've got to have someone who loves your body. Who doesn't define you, but sees you. Who loves what he sees. Who you don't have to struggle to be good enough for.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“Are you getting your period?" She narrows her eyes.
No! God. I hate that. I hate when every negative act is blamed on your period." Sometimes bitchiness is just bitchiness, happily unattached to anything hormonal. It should get full credit.”
― Deb Caletti, The Nature of Jade

“Love can come when you're already who you are, when you're filled with you. Not when you look to someone else to fill the empty space.”
― Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

“I used to think that finding the right one was about the man having a list of certain qualities. If he has them, we'd be compatible and happy. Sort of a checkmark system that was a complete failure. But I found out that a healthy relationship isn't so much about sense of humor or intelligence or attractive. It's about avoiding partners with harmful traits and personality types. And then it's about being with a good person. A good person on his own, and a good person with you. Where the space between you feels uncomplicated and happy. A good relationship is where things just work. They work because, whatever the list of qualities, whatever the reason, you happen to be really, really good together.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“Rejection, though--it could make the loss of someone you weren't even that crazy about feel gut wrenching and world ending.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“We should not give away a moment to anyone who does not deserve it.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“It's strange, isn't it, how the idea of belonging to someone can sound so great? It can be comforting, the way it makes things decided. We like the thought of being held, until it's too tight. We like that certainty, until it means there's no way out. And we like being his, until we realize we're not ours anymore.”
― Deb Caletti, Stay

“Those questions you have? Whether he's the one, whether you feel about him the way you should, or whether the relationship is going okay? When you're not sure whether you're in love with someone or not, the answer is not.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“But sometimes, too, you have this little feeling of knowing, this fuzzy, gnawing sense that someone will become a major something in your life. You just know that theirs will be a life you will enter and become a part of.”
― Deb Caletti

“It's good to let God pick a man for you. We don't do so well when we pick them ourselves. They end up lipsticks in a drawer, all those wrong colors you thought looked so good in the package.”
― Deb Caletti, The Queen of Everything

“Once an asshole, always an asshole.”
― Deb Caletti, The Fortunes of Indigo Skye

“If letting go, if letting people and things work themselves out in the way that they needed to without your help was the most important thing, then it was also the hardest.”
― Deb Caletti, The Six Rules of Maybe

“A lady I will be, but a man's accessory, his handbag, no thank you. I will not be someone's ornament. I will not just be someone's honey, baby, sweetheart.”
― Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

“Sometimes that´s all you need…, to know it´s not broken. To know you’re still whole and that you’ll heal.”
― Deb Caletti, Stay

“Things that came apart could be put together again, but never exactly the same.”
― Deb Caletti, The Six Rules of Maybe

“If you look up "charming" in the dictionary, you'll see that it not only has references to strong attraction, but to spells and magic. Then again, what are liars if not great magicians?”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“Your sibling, after all, is the only other person in the world who understands how fucked up your parents made you.”
― Deb Caletti, The Nature of Jade

“We can’t get so wrapped up in our own misconceptions that we miss the simple beauty of the truth.”
― Deb Caletti, Stay

“The most basic and somehow forgettable thing is this: Love is not pain. Love is goodness. And real love--it's less shiny than solid and simple.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“It took me years to figure out that upset was upset, and tumultuousness was not the same thing as passion. Love isn't drama.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“...What is more like love than the ocean? You can play in it, drown in it...it can be clear and bright enough to hurt your eyes, or covered in fog, hidden behind a curve of roads and then suddenly there in full glory. It's waves come like breaths, in and out, body stretched to forever in it's possibilities, and yet it's heart lies deep, not fully knowable, inconceivably majestic.”
― Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

“You can forget that other people carry pieces of your own story around in their heads. I've always thought--put together all those random pieces form everyone who's ever known you from your parents to the guy who once sat next to you on a bus, and you'd probably see a fuller version of your life than you even did while living it.”
― Deb Caletti, Stay

“An untold story has a weight that can submerge you, sure as a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean.”
― Deb Caletti, Stay

“I've heard that people stand in bad situations because a relationship like that gets turned up by degrees. It is said that a frog will jump out of a pot of boiling water. Place him in a pot and turn it up a little at a time, and he will stay until he is boiled to death. Us frogs understand this.”
― Deb Caletti, Stay

“It occurred to me then that a lot of life was either about wanting and not having, or having and not wanting.”
― Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

“Sometimes you think you've found love, when it's really just one of those objects that are shiny in a certain light--a trophy, say, or a ring, or a diamond, even. Glass shards, maybe. You've got to be careful, you do. The shine can blind you. The edges can cut you in way you never imagined. It is up to you to allow that or not.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“The magic of purpose and of love in its purest form. Not televison love, with its glare and hollow and sequined glint; not sex and allure, all high shoes and high drama, everything both too small and in too much excess, but just love. Love like rain, like the smell of a tangerine, like a surprise found in your pocket.”
― Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

“When what you want is a relationship, and not a person, get a dog.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“What they say is, life goes on, and that is mostly true. The mail is delivered and the Christmas lights go up and the ladders get put away and you open yet another box of cereal. In time, the volume of my feelings would be turned down in gentle increments to a near quiet, and yet the record would still spin, always spin. There was a place for Rose so deeply within myself that it was another country, another world, with its own light and time and its own language. A lost world. Yet its foundations and edges were permanent-the ruins of Pompeii, the glorious remnants or the Forum. A world that endured, even as it retreated into the past. A world visited, imagined, ever waiting, yet asleep”
― Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

“Let me tell you, you either have chemistry or you don't, and you better have it, or it's like kissing some relative. But chemistry, listen to me, you got to be careful. Chemistry is like those perfume ads, the ones that look so interesting and mysterious but you dont even know at first what they're even selling. Or those menues without the prices. Mystery and intrigue are gonna cost you. Great looking might mean something ve-ry expensive, and I don't mean money. What I'm saying is, chemistry is a place to start, not an end point.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“Maybe love, too, is beautiful because it has a wildness that cannot be tamed. I don't know. All I know is that passion can take you up like a house of cards in a tornado, leaving destruction in its wake. Or it can let you alone because you've built a stone wall against it, set out the armed guards to keep it from touching you. The real trick is not to let it in, but to hold on. To understand that the heart is as wide and vast as the universe, but that we come to know it best from here, this place is gravity and stability, where out feet can still touch ground.”
― Deb Caletti

“And pity--people who inspire it in you are actually very powerful people. To get someone else to take care of you, to feel sorry for you--that takes a lot of strength, smarts, manipulation. Very powerful people.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“I was like a chocolate in a box, looking well behaved and perfect in place, all the while harboring a secret center.”
― Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

“Or so we don't think about how we're just vulnerable specks trying to survive on a violent, tumultuous planet, at the mercy of hurricanes and volcanoes and asteroids and terrorists and disease and a million other things. We concentrate on having little thoughts so we don't have BIG THOUGHTS. . . . You've got to ignore the one big truth - life is fatal.”
― Deb Caletti, The Nature of Jade

“Darkness does this. It finds all the places you are hiding in. It finds all the things you are holding onto tightly and makes you let go.”
― Deb Caletti, The Queen of Everything

“People are secretive when they have secrets.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“Here is something that Peach, one of the Casserole Queens, says about men and women and love. You know that scene in Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo is standing on the ground looking longingly at Juliet on the balcony above him? One of the most romantic moments in all of literary history? Peach says there's no way that Romeo was standing down there to profess his undying devotion. The truth, Peach says, is that Romeo was just trying to look up Juliet's skirt.”
― Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

“You were supposed to have hope, right? You were supposed to respect its power and hold on. And so I did. I held, and held, and let hope fill me. But as the days went on, it seemed I could be holding for a long, long time. Hope could be the most powerful thing or the most useless”
― Deb Caletti, The Six Rules of Maybe

“Unconditional love is like a contry of two with no laws and no government. Which is all fine if everyone is peaceful and law abiding. In the wrong hands, though, you got looting and crime sprees, and let me tell you, the people who demand unconditional love are usually the ones who will rob and pillage and then blame you because you left your door unlocked.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“Funny the only two times we use the phrase "seeing someone" are when we are referring to being in a a relationship or getting psychological help.”
― Deb Caletti, Stay