Caroline

“The best things to happen to me individually were the worst things to happen to my marriage. And then, this: But the best things remain.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves–all of our selves–wherever we go.
Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was.
Inside divorced me: married me, the me who loved my husband, the me who believed what we had was irrevocable and permanent, the me who believed in permanence.
I still carry these versions of myself. It's a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Here’s the thing: Betrayal is neat. It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the ways you didn’t show up for your partner, the harm you might have done.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful