More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
She wanted to tell her that everything would turn out okay because there were so many different ways for things to turn out okay.
their childhood was a maelstrom, and this would make it harder for them to do the things that were hard enough to begin with, like chasing good grades, sleeping regular hours, developing the habits that gave you a better chance at merging smoothly into society.
“I have filled this with courage,” she announced. Evidently, they were now in a war movie. “Drink it down.”
Sometimes we choose our issues, Ms. Winger, but mostly they choose us.”
People boasted about their cancer battles and their stroke recoveries, she maintained, and yet society still viewed psychological trauma as a lesser affliction, as something you could conquer just by giving yourself a good talking-to.
“Well, I don’t know anything about bravery,” Richard told her. “But I do know that it’s always easier to stay away.”
But even if Davis had never seen any profit in burrowing down into that soil, it didn’t mean there was nothing growing in it, and it was Molly’s constitutional right to weed through it and dig up whatever bones she happened to find. She must’ve had her reasons.
“The best and the worst things in life are sudden, Ms. Winger. Everything else takes too damn long,”
It was universal, wasn’t it, a parent’s tenacious longing for the innocent past.
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.
“Dad?” “Yeah, honey?” “Do you think it’s in me to do what you did?” “What did I do?” “You connected with people. You talked effortlessly with them. You made them like you.” Norman twirled long strands of noodle around his fork. “You can make them like you, honey. You’ll just do it in a different way. What’s not to like?”
We’re all terribly unsure of ourselves, each one of us tunneling toward something strange. But you—you are nobody’s shadow. And even if you were, a shadow does not belong to the thing that casts it.
I’m just a guy who knows that sometimes in life you have to settle for the moral victory. Those tend to come along more often than actual victories.”
And having interests didn’t make you interesting. Everyone knew that.
We are never past the point of surprises.
Peace with the fact that closure might always be denied.
Someone unfought for, but not unloved. Someone not beyond fault, but not beyond redemption either.
Suddenly, it no longer mattered who’d been hiding and who’d been seeking, who was the track and who was the derailment.
We’re all terribly unsure of ourselves, son, each one of us tunneling toward something strange.
the horrible truth that everything ends. Everything. The summer when you’re sixteen. The vibrancy of your parents. The way your kid burrows into bed with you at six o’clock on a Saturday morning and falls back to sleep with her nose in the cushion of your cheek. It all leaves you, and it doesn’t ever come back.
He could handle the dying. It was the being gone he could not accept.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.’”
