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 anticipation of grief is a grief itself.”
― 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

“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

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

“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

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

“it’s usually better to wait until morning. Sunshine has a way of dusting tragedy with hope.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“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

“And then Mama Cass sings instructions on how to dream.
The grandchildren dance too.
So with my children and grandchildren circled around me, with my husband in my arms remembering quite well how to dance, I do a rock step and the years tingle through me. In a flash I’ll be gone, my own children recalling their favorite things about me in some new house at some new table with some new iteration of family.
So I dance now as if time is the music.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“Marriage is a carousel for those who can stomach the cycles of it”
― 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

“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

“we can only return to a place”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“A long love has seasons of glaring uncertainty”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“I have to be able to struggle. I couldn’t just constantly affirm you.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“every grand scheme is simply a collection of decisions”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“My greatest enemy was the man I once was”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“Maybe it’s not bad to become a different couple—not a sign that I’m unwanted”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“those who forget history are bound to repeat it. Are those who remember history bound to do better? Is memory what binds us?”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“It strikes me now what a disservice it was to hide our imperfections from our kids. We presented a false picture of our life.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“How many times we’ve done the excited parental arm pat when our kids have appeared on a stage or sports field over the years.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“Such an awful part of being a mother when things having to do with my own children aren’t my place.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“Would you be there?” I lift a hand to my heart”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“But my kids left me for healthy reasons. They had lives to live.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“The day after we settled Cam into his dorm in Oklahoma four years ago”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“Some things are seen more clearly at their end than at their start.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side

“How demoralizing it must be to know your mind is going but have no power to stop it”
― Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side