Jillian > Jillian's Quotes

“Maybe we are all fools, one way or another, when it comes to seeing the totality of the people who love us—the people we try to love.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“In one way or another, this is the deal we all sign when we love someone. For better or worse. It’s the deal we have to sign again and again to keep that love. We don’t turn away from the parts of someone we don’t want to see. However quickly or long it takes to see them. We accept them if we are strong enough. Or we accept them enough to not let the bad parts become the entire story.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“I hear the crazy. She sounds crazy. Maybe that’s what happens when the bottom falls out, you lose the ability to modulate—to make your words make sense to the rest of the world.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“But watching a program you were on had a strange effect; it made Patrick nostalgic for experiences he was still in the middle of living. It pulled him out of it. He was both him, living his life, and some ghostly version of himself, floating above his terrestrial self, watching, judging. He stopped feeling present in his own body. Stopped being able to feel this new joy, and it was eclipsed by sorrow again; perhaps happiness was destined to be temporary regardless, perhaps it never even stood a chance.”
― Steven Rowley, The Guncle

“How quickly she’d become part of the family by doing nothing else but resting her chin on his thigh while snoozing.”
― Steven Rowley, The Guncle

“We decided instead of moping our way through a difficult summer, we needed a party. We needed you.”
― Steven Rowley, The Guncle

“So many nights Patrick had looked up at the desert night sky trying to find meaning, trying to locate himself. He would always come back to the same thing: stargazing was time traveling.”
― Steven Rowley, The Guncle

“Normal is a terrible thing to aspire to,” Patrick had said. “Aim higher.”
― Steven Rowley, The Guncle

“When does it get easy?” He thought about lying, but what was the point? Greg didn’t send his children to Palm Springs to be lied to, and even if he had they deserved better. Instead, he squeezed her hand and said, “Any day now.”
― Steven Rowley, The Guncle

“Grief orbits the heart. Some days the circle is greater. Those are the good days. You have room to move and dance and breathe. Some days the circle is tighter. Those are the hard ones.”
― Steven Rowley, The Guncle

“He smiled, happy that life could still surprise. Maybe there”
― Steven Rowley, The Guncle

“I did not know that there are miles between running out of things to say, and running out of the strength to say them.”
― Ashley C. Ford, Somebody's Daughter

“But each time I left campus to come home, I spent ten minutes in the mirror reciting the same phrase like my therapist had taught me: I like myself the way I am. I like myself the way I am. I like myself the way I am. I like myself the way I am. Then, I would promise myself not to forget.”
― Ashley C. Ford, Somebody's Daughter

“We were lovers who lived together, trying to find out if we had whatever turned two people in love into the kind of family either of us wanted.”
― Ashley C. Ford, Somebody's Daughter

“When my life was new, I understood in my bones how little it mattered what anybody else was doing, or what they thought about what I was doing. I believed my bones then.”
― Ashley C. Ford, Somebody's Daughter

“When I was four years old, I taught myself to lie awake until morning. I wanted the sunrise, and I only had to stay awake to have her. When children are small, our desires seem small, even if we want the sky. Anything we want seems to be only a matter of time and effort away. It’s too early to imagine what’s already holding you back.”
― Ashley C. Ford, Somebody's Daughter

“My mother didn’t know I could do bad things and still have the sun. She didn’t know I could keep my own truth and memories inside. But I knew.”
― Ashley C. Ford, Somebody's Daughter

“Ashley, you’re the only person who has to live in your skin, and wake up with the consequences of your choices. That’s why you can’t let other people make the big choices for you. You have to do what it feels right to do, and you can’t let anybody stop you.” I heard the stifled smile again. “Not even me.”
― Ashley C. Ford, Somebody's Daughter

“The worst part was that she’d given it to him. Yes, that was always the worst part. You gave it to him. You carved out a crucial little part of yourself, and you not only gave it to him, you begged him to take it. You pushed it on him, the way you might press food on a hungry traveler or money on a less fortunate relative. You were sure at that moment that you would always have an endless supply, or at least more than enough, because you were one of the lucky ones. So you gave it to him. You did”
― Katherine Heiny, Early Morning Riser

“Oh, the joy of a shared life! The joy is not—as many people believe—building a future with someone, or opening your heart to another human being, or even the ability to gift each other money with limited tax consequences. The joy is in the dailiness.”
― Katherine Heiny, Early Morning Riser

“She should sit out here more often early in the morning. She and Duncan could have coffee here, start their day with calm and beauty. But she knew it was one of those things—like Sunday afternoon drives and mother-daughter yoga class and vacuuming the refrigerator coils—that she would think about but never actually do again, and that made it all the sweeter. — It was not for nothing that Jane taught second grade.”
― Katherine Heiny, Early Morning Riser

“How could Duncan not realize that every time you fell in love and it didn’t work out, it scraped out a little piece of you, like scooping out a piece of cantaloupe with a melon baller, and there were only so many times that could happen before the scoop marks started to show? That in really no time at all, your heart could become a cold, pockmarked stone?”
― Katherine Heiny, Early Morning Riser

“She felt a sort of cellular-level sorrow and wondered if she loved more deeply than other people. Or was everyone else just more mature, more rational? More realistic? Maybe everyone else was right, and Jane was wrong.”
― Katherine Heiny, Early Morning Riser

“Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane