Splinters Quotes

“Being an adult meant watching many possible versions of yourself whittle into just one.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“We aren’t loved in the ways we choose. We are loved in the ways we are loved.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“If you ever feel like you're in the wrong story, leave.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“I sat there on the starched sheets holding my baby, and my mother held me, and I cried uncontrollably, because I finally understood how much she loved me, and I could hardly stand the grace of it.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“Or rather, what other people called ambition often felt—to me—more like justifying my own existence. If I’d failed at happiness, then success seemed like a consolation prize. As if some tribunal in the afterlife would ask, Were you happy? And I could say, Well, no. But I did all this.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“In class, I spoke to my students about breaking open the anecdotal stories we all tell ourselves and others about our own lives. You have to dislodge the cocktail-party version of the story, I said, in order to get at the more complicated version lurking beneath the anecdote: the anger under the nostalgia, the fear under the ambition. I didn’t want their breakups summarized, I wanted specifics—wanted them stress-eating cookies as big as their palms, their fingers smelling like iron after leaning against an ex’s rusty fire escape.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“Eventually, he asked me to stop offering these pep talks. “This is hard,” he said. “Just let this be hard.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“Prayer didn't require certainty. It could take root in all this wondering. It could take root in the honesty of wanting things. Years later, my sponsor told me I didn't have to worry about asking God for the right things, carefully editing out all the requests that felt frivolous or selfish. Who did I think i was fooling, anyway? Might as well bring all my yearning.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“Where others looked at me and saw kindness, he saw the elaborate puppetry of a woman desperate for everyone to find her kind.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“When I recorded bits and pieces from our days in a journal, my inner critic and mother argued. The critic wanted to choose lyrical details—my daughter getting her little hands covered with wet cherry blossoms—while the mother in me wanted to choose… everything. Wanted not to choose. Meanwhile, a third self—the woman who hadn’t had more than a few hours of sleep in many weeks—wanted to leap twenty years into the future. Not stuck inside these days, but remembering them all.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“On our walks, I learned the names of trees I’d been walking past for years without noticing at all. London plane tree, silver maple, Siberian elm. I watched the branches beyond the nursery window turn from bare to bud to bloom, and remembered my first sponsor saying her Higher Power was just the fact that trees could grow from seeds. Her notion of divinity lived not in the spectral body of an old man with a beard, but in the fact of this absurd, stupendous transformation—at once radical and commonplace, happening in plain sight.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“Every feeling was a fucking miracle.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“My close friends were not all versions of my mother. Each was no one but herself. But with all of them, I found a version of the safety my mother first introduced me to: You don’t have to keep earning me. I’m here.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“In those early months of separation, my friends became my family. Or perhaps it was truer to say they always had been. I’d often been a creature turned like a compass needle toward the intoxication of falling in love. Even in sobriety. Especially in sobriety. But the weave of my everyday life had always been girls and women: bean stews and freeway commutes with my mother; a tight crew of girlfriends in high school, when I felt utterly invisible to the brash, cackling boys leaning against their SUVs in the parking lot; a college best friend with whom I stayed up until dawn drinking Diet Coke and arguing about God. Romance was what I’d always felt most consumed by, but my relationships with women were the ones I’d trusted more.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“The walls were hung with wooden whales painted with slogans. Feelings aren’t facts. One day at a time. Things I’d heard before. Things that didn’t help, until I woke in the middle of the night and needed them—not as a woman needs wisdom, but as a thirsty person needs water.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“You have to claim responsibility for the harm you cause. You have to believe it’s necessary.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“In recovery they talk about the God-shaped hole inside us all. But you don’t have to believe in God to recognize that feeling of an endless drain—no matter what you pour inside, or how much, it’s never enough.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“He is still that man. I am still that woman. We have betrayed those tender people, but we still carry them around inside of us wherever we go.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“remembered my first sponsor saying her Higher Power was just the fact that trees could grow from seeds. Her notion of divinity lived not in the spectral body of an old man with a beard, but in the fact of this absurd, stupendous transformation—at once radical and commonplace, happening in plain sight.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“Don't want what you're supposed to want, want what you want.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“This beauty wasn't tarnished, or rather, every beauty was.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“I was embarrassed not to be enough for myself.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“I’d trusted this belief before—that the story of love could save me. That if I could just believe in the narrative, playing like a movie in my mind’s eye, it would be enough. It hadn’t been. It wouldn’t be. Trusting the stories I told myself about romance made me feel like a moth stubbornly ramming itself against a flickering bulb. The bulb would never be the moon. The marriage plot would never be the moon. Eventually, the moth would sizzle its wings against the bright glass, or else die of exhaustion.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“Sometimes motherhood tricked me into feeling virtuous because I was always taking care of someone. But it didn’t make me virtuous at all. It made me feral and ruthless. It steeled me to do what needed to be done.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“If writing was my great love—and I was starting to believe it was, perhaps more than any man would ever be—I often wondered if it was ultimately a form of self-love, a kind of poison.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“In Los Angeles, it was easier to breathe. It always was. My hometown made me feel at ease in a way no other landscape ever would: the strip malls and cloverleaf freeway exits, the rush of salt wind on the Pacific Coast Highway, the dark silhouettes of palm trees against those startling, smog-brightened sunsets. This was where I’d gotten high with my high school boyfriend, sixteen and not a virgin anymore, driving the dark back roads thinking, not a virgin not a virgin not a virgin. These streets were the first streets I ever drove with my friends, late at night, with the radio cranked up, imagining our futures.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“When she left, I cried uncontrollably, past all rationality—as if I were a child.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“C saw right through the performances of mine that impressed everyone else. He was a keen but tender observer of other people’s coping strategies and blustering compensations. Listening to me do a radio interview, he could tell I was nervous because I was speaking too quickly. There was something electrifying, even erotic, about the experience of being seen through. The X-ray. Eventually, of course, there was another side. Years later, he told me that even though I’d managed to convince the world I was a good person, he knew what lay behind this façade: the selfishness underpinning my ambition, the virtue-signaling others mistook for virtue. Some part of me believed him. Some part of me would always believe him. Where others looked at me and saw kindness, he saw the elaborate puppetry of a woman desperate for everyone to find her kind.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“C loved basketball sneakers and bodega snacks, drank soda rather than coffee. He was easily affronted and absolutely forthright. He was not afraid of hard work or a crisis; he was consolidated by difficulty. He always rooted for the underdog. He loved Lloyd Dobler, John Cusack’s character from Say Anything: the kickboxer wooing the beautiful valedictorian, standing beneath her window in a baggy beige blazer and a Clash T-shirt, hoisting his boombox high above his head. Early on, C told me I was a miraculous creature. “You’re the future of the species,” he said. Whenever we slept apart, we texted each other first thing in the morning. My big gulp, he wrote. My dolphin.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“That was the image that stuck with me most—this man wandering away from his interviewer in these crowded streets, sidewalks full of spenders and dreamers, digging through his pockets, addressing every man who had fallen into the invisible margins, looking him in the eyes and saying Sir, Sir, Sir.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters