The Silent Wife Quotes

“Life has a way of taking its toll on the person you thought you were.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“She didn't know then that life has a way of backing you into a corner. You make your choices when you're far too young to understand their implications, and with each choice you make the field of possibility narrows. You choose a career and other careers are lost to you. You choose a mate and commit to loving no other.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“Other people are not here to fulfill our needs or meet our expectations, nor will they always treat us well. Failure to accept this will generate feelings of anger and resentment. Peace of mind comes with taking people as they are and emphasizing the positive.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“There are lots of reasons why a woman stays with a man, even when she's given up on changing him and can predict with certainty the shape that the rest of her life with him is going to take.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“Basic personality traits develop early in life and over time become inviolable, hardwired. Most people learn little from experience, rarely thinking of adjusting their behavior, see problems as emanating from those around them, and keep on doing what they do in spite of everything, for better or worse.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“In asserting that people don't change, what she means is that they don't change for the better. Whereas changing for the worse, that goes without saying.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“You make your choices when you’re far too young to understand their implications, and with each choice you make the field of possibility narrows.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“We live alone in our cluttered psyches, possessed by our entrenched beliefs, our fatuous desires, our endless contradictions - and like it or not we have to put up with this in one another.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“You will not be the same person coming out of a relationship as you were going into it.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“Every shrink knows that it's not the event itself but how you respond to it that tells the story. Take ten assorted individuals, expose them all to the same life trial, and they will each suffuse it with exquisite personal detail and meaning.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“In spite of what anyone says it’s women who make the rules.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“Acceptance is supposed to be a good thing - Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Also compromise, as every couples therapist will tell you. But the cost was high - the damping of expectation, the dwindling of spirit, the resignation that comes to replace enthusiasm, the cynicism that supplants hope. The mouldering that goes unnoticed and unchecked.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“It’s a known fact that in certain contexts people’s great strengths become their epic failings.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“Even if you forget that´s not the same as if it never happened. The slate is not entirely wiped clean; you can´t reclaim the person you were beforehand; your state of innocence is not there to be retrieved.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“Time hangs suspended, and yet it's about to end. Death should be a seduction, not a rape. Given one more minute he could do so much. Even the guilty are allowed to make a phone call, send a message. How alive he feels, how brightly he shines, like a lit fuse, a firecracker about to go off. What he wouldn't give for a minute more, just one ordinary minute tacked cudely onto the end of his life.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“that to judge others was to willfully do them harm. Respecting differences, she gathered, went beyond simply making allowances; it meant giving up your blinkered perspective, your assumption that you are necessarily right and others necessarily wrong, that the world would be a better place if everyone thought as you did.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“The experience you’ve had may be unwanted, may amount to nothing but damage and waste, but experience has substance, is factual, authoritative, lives on in your past and affects your present, whatever you attempt to do about it.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“The woman who refuses to object, who doesn’t yell and scream—there’s strength in that, and power. The way she overrides sentiment, won’t enter into blaming or bickering, never gives him an opening, doesn’t allow him to turn it back on her. She knows that her refusal leaves him alone with his choices.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“What he understands is that life has suffering in it, can’t not have suffering in it, because in life there is everything. Life is a mosaic of everything,”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“In your car you’re in your own private world and in the world at large, both at the same time.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“We live alone in our cluttered psyches, possessed by our entrenched beliefs, our fatuous desires, our endless contradictions—and like it or not we have to put up with this in one another. Do you want your man to be a man or do you want to turn him into a pussy? Don’t think you can have it both ways.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“Tolerance, beyond a point, is not widely preached, even though, inevitably, when two people rub shoulders on a daily basis, when they inhale each other’s way of being as a life premise, there is going to be a sacrifice of sorts. You will not be the same person coming out of a relationship as you were going into it. Not that she understood this then, in the beginning. When she confronted him, when he apologized, when they shed tears, when they reaffirmed their love, when they did this time after time, she didn’t sense the renunciation that was going on within her, because after all he was Todd, and he was precious to”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“It’s money not education that’s the holy grail in America.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“During his depression he lost that forward momentum. In fact, the loss of it was the very thing that was wrong with him. It was time without nuance or modulation, always the same, minute by minute, day by day. He knew nothing of the defeat or futility that people assumed he was feeling. He was simply not there, an absence, an empty space.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“Other people are not here to fulfill our needs or meet our expectations, nor will they always treat us well. Failure to accept this will generate feelings of anger and resentment. Peace of mind comes with taking people as they are and emphasizing the positive. Cheaters prosper; many of them do. And even if they don’t they are not going to change, because, as a rule, people don’t change—not without strong motivation and sustained effort. Basic personality traits develop early in life and over time become inviolable, hardwired. Most people learn little from experience, rarely think of adjusting their behavior, see problems as emanating from those around them, and keep on doing what they do in spite”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“Death should be a seduction, not a rape.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“At times he swears that he’s going to go straight, but mostly he feels like a drowning man in love with the surf.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“Whoever you are and wherever you come from, you grew into your present shape and form in the garden of your early childhood.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“As for herself, every morning on waking she gives thanks to the God she doesn’t disbelieve in. Although she can’t credit him with saving her, she needs this outlet for her gratitude.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“We are all mediums for our own basic truths. All we really have in life is the primal force that moves us through our days--our unvarnished, untutored, ever-present, inborn agency.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife