The Burning Side Quotes

“We live in homes until we leave them, and then they live in us.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“Alzheimer’s is a form of time travel, but time travel hurts. It always leaves someone behind.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“And the truth stains me: love cannot be reversed, cannot be erased, maybe cannot even be a mistake. It can end—and it does—but it is never undone.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“And the anticipation of grief is a grief itself.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“Marriage is a carousel for those who can stomach the cycles of it, orbiting an axis of children and money, of fear and brute determination. And—in some cases—of love. It’s for those who can survive coming back around to the starting place to discover that it has been subtly but irrevocably changed. We are right where we started, but we are not as we were.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“often worry about her making so much space for the pain of others that she leaves no space for her own.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“how we spend our days is how we spend our lives?”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side: A Novel

“Every marriage needs strength to survive, but especially a marriage with young children, because new buds weigh down the branch.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“Suffering is easy to imagine. It’s our responses that take us by surprise. The ways trials edit who we are.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“moment is moving time, and if it’s the nature of time to move, then it’s my nature to keep up.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“assumed those downpour days would stop when the children grew; it was what helped me survive them. But I didn’t understand the shape-shifting nature of parenting, that there will always be days when the clouds empty themselves with bellicosity.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“Maybe this is only a season”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“Would you be there?”
“Of course I would"
“Then it sounds like home.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“In a choice between two hells, I’d rather be apart than unwanted.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“I’ve been trying to erase what can’t be erased. I want April to be the woman who betrayed me or the woman on my heart’s pedestal. I want her to be wrong or right, good or bad, liar or trustworthy. But she’s all of that, and I don’t know what to do with it—
with a woman who both bandages and burns.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“Her hair is gritty and glorious in my face, and I feel bone-deep gratitude. The tide creeps closer as if the grinning Gulf knows what we’ve just decided. This bit of earth that once belonged to the Texians, the Mexicans, the French, the Spanish. Through it all, waves have lapped this shore, ever patient with the claims of men. The question of belonging is a real one, and it is one that plagues me. Don’t ask me about Texas or Mexico or my parents—what I
know is that I belong to April.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“But we can only return to a place, not a time.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“Depression and joy can both be uncomfortable”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“So I dance now as if time is the music.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“I miss the Odessa mud. We live in homes until we leave them”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“The way Deb responded to fire with hospitality”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“Marriage begins in the middle of the plot”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“do? I pitied him for his. And pity is but a shadow of love.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“My chest will radiate with emotion as I look up at the man who came here with me and our youth and our young, the man who is responsible for my little life’s greatest joys. I will place my hand in his, a vow renewal without airs. A choice I’ve made every day since the shotgun shot of our wedding, and even still.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“You can respond to death with death, or with life. We know how our parents responded, bless them.” I pass the butter dish and square my jaw firmly. “But not us,” I instruct. “We have to welcome grief without letting it pull us under.” I pause. “And you have to remember that you are not alone.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“None of this was your fault. How obvious the truth becomes when it’s applied to someone else.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“A life together is forged in ten thousand choices.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“No”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“Life is a series of wild unknowns”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“She needs to take care of people”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side