Beautiful Ugly

by Alice Feeney

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

Marriage is made of a million beautiful and ugly moments stitched together into a shared tapestry of memories, all of which are viewed and remembered slightly differently, like two people staring at the same painting from opposite ends of a room.

The only thing I don’t like about being alone is the amount of time it forces me to spend with myself.

Some people think hiding their grief will make it go away, but in my experience it only makes it hurt more. Grief is only ever yours; it’s not something you can share,

The problem with reaching the top is that there is only one direction left to go: down.

Grief is a patient thief and steals far more than people who have never known it realize.

“Success is often the result of a series of failures. Try to remember that. You never learn anything from success, but failure can teach you everything about a person.

I try to pack my feelings away in a box inside my head. Like I always do. They tend to let themselves back out.

I believe life rations happiness. People who get more than their fair share get fat on joy, those who don’t get enough forget how to feel it.

“People rarely know what they have until they lose it. They spend their lives searching for a better one, wanting more, needing more, blind to the fact that they already had it all. I think sometimes it’s only when something gets taken from a person that they appreciate what they had.

Trees grow down as well as up and I think it’s the same with people. The more we grow up, the more we learn to feel down.

I keep my thoughts to myself because silence cannot be misquoted.

I dished out sorrys like sweets at Halloween and she gobbled them all up, even the ones she didn’t like the taste of.

Everyone is addicted to something because we all need a form of escapism,

Constantly lying to yourself requires a special variety of stamina.

Why do some men always think they are right, despite having so much previous experience of being wrong?

You can only rearrange the furniture of your life a number of times before things look the same as they did.

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

Life is beautiful and life is ugly and we have to learn to live with both sides of that same coin and see the light in the darkness. The world is Beautiful Ugly, relationships are Beautiful Ugly, love is Beautiful Ugly. Understanding that makes life easier to live with.”

Men have tricked women into thinking they see us as equals, but real equality, for all women everywhere, still feels like little more than a pipe dream.

Truth is stranger than fiction and tends to hurt more too.

“I’m not a bad person. I just did a bad thing.”

Listen carefully and think before you make a decision, because sometimes the only choice is the right choice.

Old age sneaks up on us all like an unwelcome thief.

Sometimes I think we are all the unreliable narrators of our own lives.

No man is an island, but a woman can be if she needs to be.

Life is a fairy tale that rarely hands out happy endings.