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I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from other men.
“Listen up. In some ways you’ll be just like Mommy and me, and in some ways you’ll be totally different. You’re going to be you. You’re going to read whatever books you want to read, you’re going to eat whatever foods you like—but mostly things that are good for you—and your butt is going to be as wobbly or as unwobbly as you want it to be. The important thing is that you’re going to be you.
That’s when I realized that I had to be very careful around you.” “Why?” Rachel asked. She was now taking stock of the density of hair in her father’s nostrils. “I had to be careful of all the things you knew but didn’t tell me you knew.”
If that’s not a run-on sentence of hopelessness, I don’t know what is.”
“For me, it comes down to this: Am I better off with no mother in my life or a spectacularly imperfect one?”
It’s human as hell, which is refreshing, because I don’t know about you, but I don’t always find it easy to feel human.”
Maybe there was no pride to swallow, after all. Maybe the greatest harm in stepping up and accepting responsibility for one’s mistakes was admitting to the world that you were capable of them.
I realized that if you want to be the bigger person, all you have to do is act like the bigger person. You don’t have to actually be that person. People make it so hard. They wage war on themselves, they have these little battles in their head. But it really is easy. You just fucking act the part.
Even after everything Kitty had done, Molly still sometimes felt as though it were within her power to fix it all, and the fact that she hadn’t was her own crime.
Immersing herself in other people’s Kitty Wingers had not brought closure for her, but it had brought something else. Peace with the fact that closure might always be denied.
That was what youth was all about: gazing upward into your infinite, star-spangled imagination, daring to envisage all the wondrous thrusts and unknowable trajectories that awaited you.
