The Bright Years Quotes

“People always say not to forget because then history will repeat itself. But maybe history will repeat itself anyway, and forgetting is how we bear it.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“We begin to say goodbye as soon as we say hello”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“You must not measure salvation like an ingredient that’s either there or not. Yes, salvation can be a heroic moment of rescue. But more often, it’s smaller. Slower.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“There are two kinds of grief at a wake: grieving the loss of what was and grieving the loss of what wasn’t.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“A mother stays even when she's gone, like a muted moon in the daytime sky.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“The thing about alcoholism is that there’s sickness on both sides. Drink, you’re sick. Don’t drink, you’re sick. A blurred line between medicine and poison.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Everyone says gone but not forgotten, but it's ultimately the other way around. Generations later, a mother is forgotten but not gone- a pulse in the bodies born from her love”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Time can wash dirt off of a memory until it is revealed as something else entirely.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow. Louise Erdrich, LaRose”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“She wiggles and squirms and shifts, and fear hums beside me as I begin to understand that keeping a child is like keeping the sky— always with me but never mine.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Sometimes a woman's choice is between impossible and impossible and impossible, and she just has to make it. Survival calculations become more urgent than rightness.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Holding on eventually becomes more painful than letting go.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“keeping a child is like keeping the sky—always with me but never mine.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“There's something permanent about where you start”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“You can’t control anyone else’s choices, but you start with what you’re given and then you make your own.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“What's the difference between an excuse and a reason?”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“It was our pain that pulled us together like magnets, that medicinal click of solidarity between two hurting people. But as powerful as pain might be, it was never going to keep us together.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Shh, shh. Your mom will be here soon to feed you. We’re here at the beginning. I’ll paint a bottle of milk for you. I will not throw it. But I left my white crayon under the table. If we can’t take a drive, how about a little walk? I wake. Startle. She has been fed. Grown up. Hated me. Loved me again. I am old. Dying. And she is still here. This is a forgiveness I never gave my own father. But—Georgette! I close my eyes. Georgette.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“a man can be sorry from any height or depth, and he had better say it while he can.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“It's not that you don't need anyone-just that you don't need everyone.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Her heart is buried in the darkness of the earth, but it is also buried in the darkness of my body. Everyone says "gone but not forgotten," though it's ultimately the other way around: generations later, a mother is forgotten but not gone- a pulse in the bodies birthed from her love. Shit. I might want to have children. All that resurrection.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“I’ve learned how big of a dream it is to have a small life. That the cost of ambition is high.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Grief can be irrational”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Love doesn't negate salvation, just like death doesn't negate life”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“it does something to a girl—even a grown girl with an awful father—to see her father hurt.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“this is where it starts. We begin to say goodbye as soon as we say hello. Death is a corollary of birth, and to welcome life is to guarantee loss.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“it was our pain that pulled us together like magnets, that medicinal click of solidarity between two hurting people. […] But as powerful as pain might be, it was never going to keep us together. It grew strong enough to flip the magnets, pushing us apart as forcefully as it had pulled us in. The thing that built us destroyed us, and somehow, we didn’t see it coming.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“salvation is not erasure—it’s a redistribution of pressure”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“There are two kinds of grief at a wake: grieving the loss of what was and grieving the loss of what wasn't.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years