I Think We've Been Here Before Quotes

“Kids don’t realize how hard it is to be the adult, how courage doesn’t just show up, how life is actually more frightening when you’re older because the stakes get higher and higher. You love more and more people and also understand more fully how fragile and temporary they are.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“And maybe this is how time has always worked; maybe time is all over the place, only perfectly linear in a person’s memory, like a deck of cards being thrown into the air and then gathered and put in order after the fact. There’s no way to know for sure.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“Memory is imperfect, and maybe this is a feature, not a bug.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“The thing with Christmas decorating is that you can’t hold back. You kind of have to attack people with the Christmas spirit. More is actually less when it comes to this. A little more is just a little more, and a lot is almost an acceptable minimum.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“Ole closes his eyes and tries to imagine nothingness, but of course he can’t, because even with his eyes closed he is present in this car, with these people, the smells and the sounds and even the red glow of the sun on his eyelids. It’s not the event that scares him; it’s the fact that he can’t picture the part after it, and this fear is so vague and enormous that it makes him dizzy. It’s like standing on a bridge over the Grand Canyon in the dark, knowing there is vast emptiness under you but not being able to see it.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“They hadn’t known how lovely it had been to be bored, inconvenienced, irritated, sleep deprived. How lovely it had been to be alive and able to ignore death.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“those weird teenage years, where parents and kids forget how to talk to each other or relate to each other or offer each other grace.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“And maybe, ultimately, this is what a real marriage is: adults taking care of each other. Maybe you can be dependent and independent and have someone dependent on you all at the”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“he remembers believing this once, that everyone older than him should by virtue of their age automatically act better than him. At every stage in his life, he’d thought the next one would bring a feeling of having it all figured out, but it only tended to bring a feeling of having more to figure out than he had ever realized.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“optimism is when it could go either way and you try to believe it’s going to go the good way. Denial is when it’s going to go the bad way, for sure, and you pretend it’s going to go the good way.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“allergic”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“her naivete emanates from her like a visible aura, broadcasting to everyone that she’s helpless. She’s dependent. She’s a child. Which is not fair, because she’s not any of these things. She just hasn’t had a chance yet to prove it to anyone. Not even to herself.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“What a gift, one he doesn’t take for granted, the ability to interact with reality and actually take pleasure in it.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“too hard to hear over the silent racket.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“Maybe when something so awful happens, it feels like it’s happened before because you spend so much time over the course of your life imagining awful things happening”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“What if birth is like . . . just thinking out loud here . . . what if childbirth is a metaphor. A message. A little message to all of humanity, to remind us that our bodies know what to do, and that everything will be okay?”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“He simply dislikes her because she irritates him on a cellular level,”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“Her art, the culmination of her life and experiences and knowledge and ability and taste, has always been worth as much as anybody else’s, and everyone else’s art is just as meaningless as hers. And for that reason, all of it is very beautiful, even the stuff that’s ugly.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“It’s a rule that people you greatly dislike can do the most banal things and drive you as mad as if they were behaving in egregiously hostile ways,”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“It feels like a riddle. When do you do something if now is too soon but there is no later?”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“wonders if the people around him realize that old age doesn’t automatically confer boundless wisdom and goodness upon a person,”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“This is what marriage looks like after so many years. She can hold his hand and feel comforted by him even as she wants to shove his face into the Jell-O salad.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“Sometimes the mind wonders about things because it wonders, and sometimes it wonders about things because it knows.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“Reality is space and time in all directions forever and ever, including inward, all of the observable things and all of the things too small or too large to be witnessed, all of the things that happen subconsciously and all of the things that cannot be seen but can be felt and sensed and just barely glimpsed: hearts beating, blood flowing, coincidence and happenstance and depthless pain and boundless joy, déjà vu and presque vu and jamais vu. None of it makes a person feel especially ‘grounded,’ no matter what you believe about where it started or how it is going to end. Reality is watery.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“You think things like this are going to change you into someone else, but generally they make you more of who you already are. That’s true of lots of things. Tragedies. Weddings. Ends of civilizations.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“The only thing worse than finding out it’s the end of the world is having to talk through your feelings about it with your mom.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“The truth, it turns out, is sometimes the truth whether it is even true or not.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“As it turns out, the way to keep sane when the world is ending is the exact same as when it’s not.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“How unfair that time only goes one way, that by the time you understand how much you will miss something, it’s only because you’re already missing it.”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before

“Why doesn’t the thought of not having existed before bother him as much as the thought of not existing after? It’s the same exact thing!”
― Suzy Krause, I Think We've Been Here Before