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“Men do things, and women apologize for them.”
Only here, when it was just the two of them, did she look inside herself and find a heroine.
Marley wondered whether it was possible to love someone and not worry about them.
She didn’t want to be someone who only thrived at beginnings.
“I want to love someone,” Marley said. “I know it’s not enough—but that’s what I see. Maybe it’s a man, maybe it’s a child. I don’t know.” “Maybe,” Ruth spoke softly, “it’s you.”
“Oh, she loves you? You took away her choice, Waylon. Marley will never get it back.
They dared to be happy, and they were.
She often wondered whether all women were treated this way, as if motherhood were her inevitable blessing and curse, or whether the world was harder on her because she’d become a mother in the wrong way. Yet when she looked at Theo, she knew there was nothing wrong about it. It was everything else that seemed broken and ready to fall apart.
Waylon still saw her, she told herself, and all the things she carried. He would not let her break.
“This life is unmerciful to mothers. Always has been, always will be.”
Who could know what to search for in a mother? Children were trained to look at her and see their own needs instead.
Elise saw her daughter-in-law as an adversary, of sorts. A ripple effect. A looking into what might have been, and what already was.
They’re fragile, our men. Surely you can see that. No telling what they’ll do if they discover I’m not the saint who feeds them supper.”
It made me feel like not everything is dying.”
A whole person loves well. They keep their promises. They tell the truth.
Patrick would rather uncover a murderer living among them than admit that he was in love with his best friend.
At some point, a marriage must become a junkyard of things, unfinished sentences and earring backs scattered across the floor.
“I’ve replayed it over and over in my head, and I don’t think my mother ever looked at me that way. I think she was always calculating the cost of what it took to love me.”
“It costs nothing to love you.”
she hadn’t known what it would mean to be a wife. What it would ask of her, what it would take away.
