Apples Never Fall

by Liane Moriarty

After years of begging her children for quiet, she now couldn’t endure it. The silence howled through her so-called empty nest.

“Regret” can be my memoir’s theme,

Her past kept bumping up against her present lately.

as if it were possible to use sheer force of will to mold Amy into a regular person.

but when Stan was gone, he was gone, and if she thought about that too much and all it implied she could tap into a great well of rage, so she didn’t think about it. That was the secret of a happy marriage: step away from the rage.

“It starts out small. You put up with little things in a relationship and then … the little things gradually get bigger.”

She didn’t come from old money or new money but from never-quite-enough money.

The added weight of their hopes for her success was too much to bear.

It wasn’t her opponent she was fighting but herself, the voice in her head. Amy! You stupid idiot! Sometimes Joy felt like that summed up Amy’s whole life: a constant power struggle with a cruel, invisible foe.

How could the reality of grief be worse than her imagining of it, when she had imagined it so very, very hard?

“Soulmate,” repeated Joy. “I don’t know about that. He was just a boy. He’s not perfect. I’m not perfect. When you’re young you get so worked up about things you think you could never forgive,

There were tiny seeds of bitter resentment at the center of her heart, like the tiny bitter seeds at the center of even the sweetest apple.

Everything was always meant to be temporary.

There was no such thing as a nice, ordinary, happily married couple.

When she thought of that long night, it was like remembering an extraordinarily tough match where she’d prevailed. Except there was no trophy or applause. The only recognition you got for surviving a night like that came from other mothers. Only they understood the epic nature of your trivial achievements. What had been the point of it all?

You can choose the right shot, you can have a good swing and good technique, you can do everything right, and it can still go wrong. No player, no matter how good, makes one hundred percent of their shots. Some days you lose.

You can be number one in the world, you can win and win and win, but it’s inevitable: eventually you will lose.

her sacrifice had been his considered decision.

The point of history was to learn from it, not repeat it.

Accept nothing. Believe nothing. Check everything.

Once you’ve hit a ball there’s no point watching to see where it’s going. You can’t change its flight path now. You have to think about your next move. Not what you should have done. What you do now.