Wreck Quotes

“Grief is like the sound of the exhaust fan over the stove—a constant hum that recedes a little to the background over time, though you never get to turn it off.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“Life is a near-death experience. And death is a real-life one.
You just want to wake up while you still can. While the world is turning and the owls are calling and gratitude is the very air you are still breathing, because, whatever happens next, that's how lucky you are.
You are still breathing.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“To have a child is to have your heart go walking around outside your body for the rest of your life—”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“I'm an undammable river of mother love. I'm a torch-brandishing one-woman mob, and I will go after anyone who casts doubt upon the rightness of my child. Even if that person is me.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“Grief is like the sound of the exhaust fan over the stove—a constant hum that recedes a little to the background over time”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“His personality is very cross that bridge when you come to it. Mine is very apply to engineering school in case there's a bridge that might need crossing but it hasn't been designed yet.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“Only this -- loving each other like there's plenty of room on the life raft. Like there's no tomorrow -- or like there is one, and you don't want to wake up hungover with regret. You just want to wake up wile you still can. While the world is turning and the owls are calling and gratitude is the very air you are still breathing, because, whatever happens next, that's how lucky you are.
You are still breathing.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“If you're not careful, you'll end up mistaking difference for loss--which is how you lose everything.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“The enormity of my love for these tender, fleshly beings was twinned with a potential for loss so unimaginably deep and powerful that it was like a black hole lurking just outside our window.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“Remember the world from back when you couldn't even find out if you had strep throat without a doctor calling the wall phone in your kitchen? Now you just click into your computer and discover that you have cancer - or that you have - I'm seeing this now - a white-blood-cell disorder called leukopenia - or that they've scheduled your autopsy.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“And what if I never know anything certain again for the rest of my life?
Except love, someone said. You know that for sure.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“If you had told me, when Willa was fifteen, that it would ever be like this, I would have thought you were pranking me just to be mean. Back then, every molecule in her body recoiled, in horror, from every molecule in my own. I exhaled carbon dioxide that she was then forced to inhale! I manifested odors and opinions and existence, and all of it was unspeakable, intolerable. I felt, for a year or two, like I was kneeling soundless with a palmful of birdseed, hand extended, waiting for the wild animal of my daughter to approach me." page 97, Wreck”
― Catherine Newman , Wreck

“It's called the Gate of Hope...Maybe what you're feeling is your life. It's the full, expansive possibility of being alive.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“The lump in my throat was part sorrow and part gratitude. Maybe that’s what it always is, and we just forget to notice how lucky we are because we’re so busy choking and trying not to cry.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“That you treat less like a temple and more like a kiosk selling novelty candy corn at the mall.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“lump in my throat was part sorrow and part gratitude. Maybe that’s what it always is”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“I used to talk to Nick and the kids when I was writing my etiquette column -- I'd read aloud the dilemmas and we'd discuss our thoughts. The questions were all over the place, What do I do about my neighbor's unbearable wind chimes, my mother-in-law's suffocating myrrh body wash . . .. But every individual question was really a version of the same existential one: People are different from me. How do I survive it?

"With as much grace as possible: was our answer, every time. What else is there? . . .

If you're not careful, you'll end up mistaking difference for loss -- which is how you lose everything.”
― catherine newman, Wreck

“I used to talk to Nick and the kids when I was writing my etiquette column -- I'd read aloud the dilemmas and we'd discuss our thoughts. The questions were all over the place, What do I do about my neighbor's unbearable wind chimes, my mother-in-law's suffocating myrrh body wash . . .. But every individual question was really a version of the same existential one: People are different from me. How do I survive it.

"With as much grace as possible: was our answer, every time. What else is there? . . .

If you're not careful, you'll end up mistaking difference for loss -- which is how you lose everything.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“Why had we all been taught the expression Accidents happen? The presumed inevitability paralyzed me with fear. Was I brave enough to love anybody? Maybe. Maybe not.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“I’ll just loiter around scrollingly for a bit.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“I am becoming my own mother. I’m afraid I’ve a bit of sad news was one of her favorite conversation openers.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“Don't cry or I'll cry," my dad says. He has not historically been a crier, but he is one now, because that's how life is. You don't yet know who you'll become.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“I used to talk to Nick and the kids when I was writing my etiquette column—I’d read aloud the dilemmas and we’d discuss our thoughts. The questions were all over the place. What do I do about my neighbor’s unbearable wind chimes”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“admire the burstingly gorgeous college students”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“I guess I just want to agree now that we won’t make Jamie feel like it’s an inquisition into his decency,” I’m saying. “Or, like, an intervention about his principles. It’s just us. He’s not on trial.” When nobody speaks, I lean out to look at their faces, and Nick and Willa both have the exact same expression of bemused irritation. “I’m the only one who would make him feel like that?” I say, and they nod. I lean back against the car. “That’s probably true,” I say. “Note to self.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“stop myself from asking her to google how often a migraine turns out to be an occult or bursting brain aneurysm because this is a bad neighborhood in my mind that nobody else should be led into.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“I remind myself that when all the doctors are actual robots and not just humans that act like robots, I will miss him.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“I picture my own kids, stoned and rewatching the Bad Bunny Tiny Desk Concert, directing”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck