Strangers Quotes

“I hope because I was open about what happened to me, my children will insist on intimacy, on knowing their partner deeply, on being known deeply. I hope they will talk to their partners about money, about what will happen if the partnership ends. I hope that as they build trust in their relationships, they never lose sight of their own authority, their own voice, their own intuition. I hope they will move toward people who are in pain, rather than away. I hope they will understand that every person has experiences that make them who they are. I hope they will fall in love with abandon as I did with their father. I hope they will know, from watching me, that if everything falls apart, they can get up and piece together something new.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“It was having everything I had counted on collapse so suddenly, forcing me to let go of the idea that I could control outcomes.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“She seemed to be reminding me of what we’d discussed many times, Everyone has something. This is yours. Each life has a defining crisis.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“And doesn’t it all look different, wouldn’t your own story look different, if you knew how it was going to end?”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“Even in my lowest moments, even in the nadirs of hurt and betrayal, I still believed in our love story, in our happiness as a family. Those stories are preserved in the words we wrote to each other, in the movies James made, in the albums I made, in the life we collected over the years. But they also exist in our kids' minds, in their skin and bones, in their souls. And in mine. James changed our present and our future, but not our past.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“And I could see that the cost for feeling safe was being controlled. They were two sides of the same coin—protection and control.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“Taylor Swift’s album folklore was released on July 24, Susan’s birthday. I had never been an avid fan, but it felt like the album was written especially for me. There were songs about illicit affairs, the end of a relationship (“you never gave a warning sign”), heartbreak, mad women. It became the soundtrack of my summer. I abandoned books and podcasts. I pressed play, again and again.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“We had all been taught to fill in the hole that men left, to be quiet about men behaving badly, to move on with grace.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“If what happened in our divorce was vengeance, it was an existential vengeance, not a personal one. It had very little to do with me. And it existed on another plane from our love story.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“Slowly, over many months, as my head came out of the sand, a form of joy set in —joy born of replacing the not knowing with knowing, the nub of worry with clarity, the lack of control with control...I thought, 'this is better than everything I lost. This is better than the life I thought I wanted.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“To them, a woman writing about a man leaving is, somehow, worse than the man leaving.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“Once again, the rigor of the work, the detail of it, was absorbing and grounding. It forced me to think about something other than my divorce. It also forced me to acknowledge how myopic, how grandiose I'd been about my own story. It wasn't just about recognizing my comparative good fortune (which was enormous); it was seeing the scope of life, of challenge, of suffering, of what human beings ensure; it was zooming out.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“People assumed that once James left, the moment he walked out the door, my love for him would vanish too. But how does one turn that off after twenty-two years? How long does it take your unconscious mind to catch up?”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“I like myself more now.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“But I also tried to have compassion for the woman I was, agreeing to all of it, trusting my husband.
I did it for love. There is nothing shameful about that.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“I could see that some people, both online and in person, were uncomfortable with me coming out of my lane, a place where women stayed quiet, where men are allowed to do what serves them, no matter what the wreckage. I could see they were defending something bigger, a way of life, the safety it gave them.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“It was having everything I had counted on collapse so suddenly, forcing me to let go of the idea that I could control outcomes. It was the loss of my identity as a wife, my identity as part of a married couple. I had to get comfortable existing outside the norm, outside of what had once been my ideal.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“It is what he made clear within weeks of leaving, that he believed my contributions to his career, to our family, over twenty years, amounted to nothing.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“There is nothing I look back on now and say, How could I have missed that? Other couples I knew then, and know now, had many more flags, redder flags, and they stayed married.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“volunteering”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“When I think of James now, I think of that man waving. He is not a villain. He is a man with his own wounds. He is my children’s father, the source of many years of love and happiness. He is someone who made decisions about his own life, his own future.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“It was then that I said to myself, This is what was meant to happen. This was the only way I could get here.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“I thought, This is better than everything I lost. This is better than the life I thought I wanted.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“Slowly, over many months, as my head came out of the sand, a form of joy set in—joy born of replacing the not knowing with knowing, the nub of worry with clarity, the lack of control with control. All made easier, of course, by the fact that I had enough to feel secure, to make my children secure.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“amendment to the agreement: instead of sharing anything earned during the marriage, only assets that had been put in joint name would be split. Anything that was in my name alone, or his name alone, would not be split. James explained that it was fair to do it this way, that we should each keep what we made during the marriage unless we affirmatively chose to share it. His reasoning made sense to me.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“Be brave. Claim it. Say it. Break the cycle.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“But what if the story I told myself wasn’t true? What if he always had a different story?”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending, of his exit, felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. They both left me reeling. In both instances, he was definitive, certain. There was no gray area. The switch went on, and then it went off. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn’t.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“Exactly a year after James left me”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“He said, in a singsong voice, like a taunting child, “Boo-hoo. Poor Belle. Always the victim.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage