Wreck Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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