Once and Again Quotes

“Life isn't one thing. Neither is marriage. Horrible things happen. We do terrible things to each other. But somehow, sometimes, we are able to carry on. Maybe. And that's the magic, isn't it? Not the ticket. Not the trick of turning back the clock. Not the spontaneous, extraordinary good luck. The magic is living with it. The magic is living through it.”
― Rebecca Serle, Once and Again

“There is no way to protect the people we love. Eventually life finds us and then all we have to meet it with is grit.”
― Rebecca Serle, Once and Again

“Isn’t it always the mundane we want to return to when something catastrophic happens?”
― Rebecca Serle, Once and Again

“Truth is easy to understand, even when it is unbelievable.”
― Rebecca Serle, Once and Again

“Doctor says I could live another twenty years.” Twenty years. It’s a long time. It isn’t enough.”
― Rebecca Serle, Once and Again

“And it’s there in the passage—mother and child, child and mother, grief and love and love and grief, the indistinguishable nature of these things, their inherent ties, that I finally understand the legacy I come from. We are saviors. What does it mean that I chose—selfishly, hastily, thoughtlessly—to save myself?”
― Rebecca Serle, Once and Again

“It connected them more deeply, deeper than they had been before. I’ve heard only children sometimes say that they feel a part of their parents’ marriage. That there is no “us” and “them” but instead just “we.” That there is no separation between a marriage and a family when there is only one child. But I always felt like a little bit of an outsider to my parents’ marriage. I suspected my dad was my mom’s priority, and I didn’t resent it, exactly, but I didn’t like it, either. And after the accident it went from suspected to obvious. To fact. My mom orbited around him—the man she loved, the man she had saved, the man she’d do anything to protect. And so I started to protect him, too.”
― Rebecca Serle, Once and Again

“don’t know if I believe in mistakes anymore,” I say. “I think there’s just what we choose to do about what comes next.”
― Rebecca Serle, Once and Again

“this stage all I’ve got is words. There are no more tits, no waist. I’d put on makeup if I could still locate my eyelids. Getting old it not for the faint of heart, and anyone who tells you differently is thirty-fucking-five.”
― Rebecca Serle, Once and Again

“Life moves only forward”
― Rebecca Serle, Once and Again

“I wanted it to be true so badly. I wanted to be pregnant even if it was a chemical pregnancy. I’d find myself jealous of women who had miscarriages. I longed to just know I could. To experience the beginning”
― Rebecca Serle, Once and Again

“I’m winded and shocked. I feel simultaneously wrung out and high on adrenaline. It was a tiny wave—not tunnel”
― Rebecca Serle, Once and Again