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 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

“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

“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 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

“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

“To them, a woman writing about a man leaving is, somehow, worse than the man leaving.”
― 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

“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

“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 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

“All this. My story. The end of my marriage. For the second time, my experience had been rewritten, the characters recast, the ending changed. In this man’s telling, I was the casualty of someone else’s destiny. My despair was their happy ending. I doubled over, seized with a desperate, wild hurt. I said, “I’m sorry, I have to go.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“I think people have a language for death; they know what to do, what to say. But there is no script for divorce, especially one as dramatic as yours.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“I like myself more now.”
― 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

“My kids make every day of my life better.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“Each life has a defining crisis.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

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

“James’s care for our money felt like his contribution to our family, the way he showed his love and commitment to me and the kids. There was something romantic about it too—the smart and honorable man, the devoted husband and father, shouldering this part of our life. I had my own bucket of responsibility—the kids, their school, the meals, the homework, the bedtimes—so it made sense that he would take on our finances. We were dividing and conquering.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“We had all been taught to fill in the hole that men left”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I had never thought about this before—how a closed-ended response, no matter how well-intentioned, can feel like an ending—the declining of an invitation to engage.”
― 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