Darkness, My Old Friend Quotes

“Story is life, Miss Graves,” he said. She’d heard him say that a million times. She finally understood what he meant.”
― Lisa Unger, Darkness, My Old Friend

“But sometimes we hurt the people we love, and we do it because something inside us is hurting,” she said. “It doesn’t even have to do with the other person. Sometimes there’s just this ugly, unhappy place inside us. And everything bad—anger, jealousy, sadness—it all lives there.” Mr. Vance was looking at her so intently that she almost stopped talking. Everyone was looking at her. “Go on,” Mr. Vance said. “And sometimes you go there—you live in that place. And when you’re there, you might do and say terrible things. Because things that are good and happy and bright seem ugly and cause you pain. You want to smash those things. You want other people to hurt, too. So you hurt them, even if you love them.”
― Lisa Unger, Darkness, My Old Friend

“A Separate Peace by John Knowles. Seminal coming-of-age tale. Intense adolescent friendship gone awry. Having to face yourself because of your own ugly deeds. Did Gene bounce the branch on purpose? Of course he did. Whether he realized it or not. No one else in class wanted to believe it. “It was an accident,” the pert and pretty Jenna said. She sounded almost desperate. “He couldn’t. He just wouldn’t. They”
― Lisa Unger, Darkness, My Old Friend

“Sarah’s death and how it haunted you, how you were swallowed by your guilt. But your mother was at least partially responsible for how you handled that situation as well. Let’s not forget that you were just a kid. With the right guidance, you might have come through that incident better.” Jones”
― Lisa Unger, Darkness, My Old Friend

“I’ve had my fill of cool, Willow. These days it’s kindness, honesty, and stability that impress me.”
― Lisa Unger, Darkness, My Old Friend

“But that was the hypocrisy of adulthood: You never wanted the children you cared about to do things you’d done when you were heedless of the fragility of life.”
― Lisa Unger, Darkness, My Old Friend

“Wasn’t there some belief about how if you drop a frog into boiling water, it will jump right out? But if you put it in cold water and turn up the heat gradually, it will allow itself to slowly cook to death?”
― Lisa Unger, Darkness, My Old Friend

“It was a funny, impossible little trap of nature, motherhood. It muddled your brain with floods of hormones and sleep deprivation, kept you constantly busy tending to a million needs, had you forever thinking about the care of others. You could disappear into motherhood, forget completely that once upon a time you were an athlete, a graduate student, that you had ambitions to go into politics, change the world. That once upon a time you wanted to write. And even though motherhood wiped all that away like a cosmic eraser over the chalkboard of your life, it gave you something else—this crazy, blissful, adoring love that splits you open and redefines you from the inside out.”
― Lisa Unger, Darkness, My Old Friend

“The rich and vivid imagining that served her so well on the page was torture in her real life sometimes, if she let her thoughts sweep her away.”
― Lisa Unger, Darkness, My Old Friend