Beautiful Ugly

by Alice Feeney

If all we need is love, why do we always want more?

My wife tells stories that matter, trying to save the world from itself. I tell stories that matter to me.

My books have always been a place to hide myself inside myself when the real world gets too loud.

I prefer dogs to humans. Dogs are loyal.

she might be proud of me again. Look at me the way she used to.

Couldn’t write a word when life was too loud.”

“Success is often the result of a series of failures.

You never learn anything from success, but failure can teach you everything about a person.

He’s chasing something he’ll never find, but we’re all guilty of

It feels like coming home. Which makes no sense.

Because I’ve never been here before.

“read and not heard.”

“Stay close, Columbo,” I say. The dog does what I tell him to do. He is the only living creature ever to do so.

I don’t think this place will be here forever.

It’s the not giving up that separates the winners from the losers.

The only way out is to write.

never occurred to me that I’d made a huge mistake. Until now.

“I’ve been lying to him, and I think he knows.” “Lying to him about what?” she asks. “Everything.”

“Like most things, we first learn by imitating others, from watching other people and copying how they interact. That often means learning from our parents. Did your parents have a loving relationship?”

Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t. Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.

Nana was a librarian and her home always smelled of toast,

but I’m the only person in the world who was lucky enough to read it.”

“The Isle of Amberly.”

The picture shows a birthday cake with the number ten written on it in icing.

I never met Abby’s parents—they were both dead when we got together. I only met Kitty, her godmother. Abby lived in London with Kitty since she was … ten or eleven, I think? She never mentioned the Isle of Amberly, not once, I would have remembered.

And nobody knows about Charles Whittaker’s book, or what I’ve done. Nobody knows except me.

Fear of death. Fear of abandonment. Fear of failure.

Meeting the man my wife had married was something I struggled to prepare myself for.

i dont think there are men or children on the island

Against all odds were three of her favorite words.

felt strange coming back to the island after all these years. It was even stranger to visit the cabin when Grady wasn’t there and to be surrounded by my husband’s things.