How the Light Gets In Quotes

“All this time Eleanor could never stop mourning what had been lost, grieving what she no longer had. She made her children’s sorrows her own. That may have been the thing that was hardest for Ursula: her mother’s sadness, that she couldn’t fix. She, who tried so hard to fix everything.”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“When a child estranges herself from you (there’s that word Eleanor tries not to employ when speaking of her situation, but it applies) you can allow it to crush you. Or you rebuild your world—smaller maybe, less ambitious, imperfect, with space for sorrow, but also occasional joy. Maybe you see your child only once a year. Maybe never. Maybe she doesn’t want you to see your grandchildren. She may rewrite the history of her childhood, casting you as the source of her greatest trauma. She gets to have her story. But nobody can take away yours—that you loved her, you tried your best. The door remains open.”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“What would Jimmy Carter do?”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“The hardest things I faced come from having children.”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“the election appears to have unleashed previously concealed forms of self-interest, bullying, greed, and downright cruelty.”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“She knows now, as she did not once, what matters and what really doesn’t. At fifty-eight years old, Eleanor has reached a stage in her life when it no longer makes sense to revisit all the old grievances or to hold on to bitterness that hurt nobody as much as one’s self. She has forgiven Cam for all the ways he disappointed and hurt her. She has had to forgive herself, too, for her own vast catalog of shortcomings and failures, poor choices, damage incurred to those she loved and to herself. She knows now what she did not before, that every family’s history is made up of many stories—all probably possessing some element of truth, but none of them, individually, containing all of it.”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“Loss happens. So does grief. The best we can do is to know, when it does, that it’s survivable.”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“not just a disaster for Antarctica. It’s a disaster for the planet.”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“For virtually his entire adult life he’s been haunted by the knowledge that the glaciers are retreating. Once they go, it’s”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“selenite crystal”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“If you loved someone deeply once, if you had children with that person, if there had been a time when the two of you called yourselves a family, the connection could never fully disappear.”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“Somewhere Over the Rainbow: The Best of Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole.”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“The only person whose happiness lay in one’s own hands was one’s own self.”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“Eleanor has a good man at her side—not all the time, but enough of it. She has her children, and their children, and most of them get along. It’s not everything. Nobody gets everything. It’s more than enough. Every day, she’s grateful.”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“terrible. And it may be the case—it probably is—that a person’s glorious triumphs seldom serve as the best teachers of what it means to be human. The lessons are all in the failures. Failure keeps you humble. Failure opens your heart to all those other people out there who also fall short. It makes a person try to do better.”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“What she sees now is the beautiful part. There is a reason some people are broken. If nobody ever broke, if everything always turned out the way you wanted, if the sun always shone and the rain never fell, if there was only spring and no winter, only music and no silence, only love without loneliness, where would beauty come from, or amazement? If nobody ever died, how could they know the preciousness of every day they got to be alive in the world?”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“not to go looking for them. Keep your eyes open and they’d appear. And for one fleeting moment anyway, you remembered what happiness felt like.”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“Whatever it is those children of yours need at this point,” Jason tells her, “they’re probably not going to get it from you.”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“There could be no repairing the old mistakes. All a person could hope for was to do better in the future.”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“Here was what she knew now, that she hadn’t admitted to herself all those years back. The failure of their marriage had been a two-way street. Each of them had let the other down—Cam with his inability to pay attention; for Eleanor, her inability to forgive. The surprising thing was that here they were—the two of them together again. All the old passion had burned away, but also the anger.”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In

“If you live long enough, everything happens. The good and the terrible. And it may be the case—it probably is—that a person’s glorious triumphs seldom serve as the best teachers of what it means to be human. The lessons are all in the failures.”
― Joyce Maynard, How the Light Gets In