The Secret of Everything Quotes

“"I always read everything when I was a kid-and I do mean everything, from Nancy Drew to Dickens to my dad's John D. MacDonald-but then I went to regular school and the English teachers started telling me to read 'real' books, so I tried. And you know, I kinda went off reading for a while. I had already been reading literary novels and the classics mixed in with whatever else, but-" She waved a hand. "So I went back to reading whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to-reading had been my greatest pleasure in all the world. I mean I never really watched all that much television, because we were moving around, never really had solid digs until I was thirteen, so reading was everything.”
― Barbara O'Neal, The Secret of Everything

“It was as if their feet ran on parallel train tracks and pulled in at the same stations at the same time, over and over.”
― Barbara O'Neal, The Secret of Everything

“He sat across from her and took her small hands in his own. "Babe, you don't have to carry the world. I've got it, okay?”
― Barbara O'Neal, The Secret of Everything

“You couldn’t unsee a thing once it was seen, unknow it once it was known.”
― Barbara O'Neal, The Secret of Everything

“remembered reading once that a person had to grieve for half the length of the relationship itself. She’d lived with Glenn for nearly four years. Surely she must be close to finished by now.”
― Barbara O'Neal, The Secret of Everything

“-I don't know that thin and pretty is what Nat is supposed to be, though. Does that make any sense?"
If she'd been holding on to any illusions about how much she liked Vince Grasso-not lusted for him, which she also did-that last speech would have cinched it. "It makes perfect sense. She's beautiful in her own way, but pretty is something...else. And I've had friends who were really pretty-it didn't always help them all that much.'
"Yeah," he said. "My wife was pretty, and she was miserable her whole life. I just want my girls to be happy. Be themselves, you know, whatever it is.”
― Barbara O'Neal, The Secret of Everything

“finding”
― Barbara O'Neal, The Secret of Everything

“A sharp wind whistled in over the water, and for the first time in more than thirty years, he was afraid. Not of the past. He didn’t believe in regrets. Life came at you like a hurricane, and you did what you could with whatever it blew into your hands, good and bad. Given the choice, he’d do it all exactly the same.”
― Barbara O'Neal, The Secret of Everything

“Funny how you didn’t know when you were happy. She was happy now, too, of course, but not with that same sense of gilded … what? Expectation. The sense of possibility and wonder. Anything could happen. Life could carry you anywhere. When you were young, you didn’t realize that the “anywhere” could be a place you didn’t want to go.”
― Barbara O'Neal, The Secret of Everything