A Family Affair Quotes

“Sometimes it’s better not to know. Nothing can change what is or what happened and digging around in the past is only going to make you miserable.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“How could parents raise children and then watch them walk out of their lives? Were thy all masochists? Why would they do that to themselves? He knew the answer deep down; he'd felt it when Chrissie told him she loved him. They did because for all the pain and heartache children brough, they gave back equal amounts of pure, limmitless joy.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“Marriage was nothing but a primitive form of torture”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“It was true that one could be more alone with someone than by oneself.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“Why couldn’t people just be who they were? Womanizers, drinkers, liars, and manipulators, instead of pretending around it all, hiding the secrets like dirty laundry stuffed under a bed, and then dying, so the grieving got whammed with two losses—the flesh-and-blood bodies and the images they thought they knew.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“A mother knows her children’s weaknesses, even if she sometimes refuses to acknowledge them.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“everything—sound, sight, feeling, certainly understanding. Christine remembered little of that night other than the smear of life and loss pulling her under, sinking her soul, and the sight of her mother crumpled in a chair with Uncle Harry and his glass of Johnny Walker Red. A man called, he’d said…”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“But there’s nothing like the silence of early morning. Your father used to love to sit on the back porch with his first cup of coffee, just gazing out at the hills.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“How does a mother tell her child that the memories he holds of his father are incorrect, that the truth does not even remotely resemble the memory? How does she tell him about the gaping holes in the recall that make it all a sham?”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“chignon.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“It’s human nature, the best and the worst of it. We’re trying to save another person’s feelings, dangling a shred of hope in front of him a little longer, because we don’t want to make him feel bad, or worse, make ourselves look bad.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“couldn’t”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“loves”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“How could parents raise children and then watch them walk out of their lives? Were they all masochists? Why would they do that to themselves? He knew the answer deep down; he’d felt it when Chrissie told him she loved him. They did it because for all the pain and heartache children brought, they gave back equal amounts of pure, limitless joy.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“People walked away all the time, telling themselves they’d be giving up a huge piece of self if they compromised but in the end, the uncompromised individual ended up with a whole piece of nothing.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“But a mother sees her child’s shortcomings, even if she doesn’t admit to them very often.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“Life was filled with so many twists and turns, like the sides of a prism, giving off light; what seemed wrong before seemed almost right when viewed from a different angle.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“Why do some women feel their only value is in their body? Why do they continue to stuff their shapes into too-tight dresses, their feet into stilettos, their brains into closed vaults that can’t breathe and subsequently suffocate? Why do they tuck and nip and smooth when the ultimate beauty isn’t on the surface at all? And why do they not see this?”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“That was the problem with the whole goddamn world; nobody had balls enough to call a spade a spade. Dead was dead; it was a hell of a lot more permanent than a milquetoast “not being here.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“In a society that valued politeness over truth, where malice and subterfuge were commonplace, even accepted, Lily’s frankness was labeled an eccentricity of her “condition.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“Lily’s room transformed into a treasure chest told from a child’s perspective; minute details unearthed, bits and scraps of memory whose retelling left poignant longings, soft-spoken, reverent whispers, exposing more about the private life of Charles Blacksworth and his family than any detective ever could.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“The child hurled herself into Christine’s arms. “Christine! Christine!” In the seconds that followed, Christine forgot the circumstances that had brought her into Lily’s Desantro’s life, forgot the pain of betrayal and loss, forgot everything but the honest emotions of the child, blending with the scent of her hair, an apples and cinnamon concoction, the feel of her breath along Christine’s neck, faint, tiny puffs of air, and the sound of Lily’s small whimpers as she tried to calm herself.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“But it wasn’t the high foreheads, the flat noses, the half protrusion of thick lips that pulled Christine in, held her there, as she studied them one by one. Their physical appearances faded next to the expressions on their faces. Pure joy.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“Their physical appearances faded next to the expressions on their faces. Pure joy.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“Caring too much has its own dangers. No matter how far our society’s come, one partner is always more committed than the other, and that’s the one who’ll be more disappointed.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“I don’t have any experience with,” she faltered, “children like Lily.” “Most people don’t. It’s the demand for perfection in our society and the definition of that perfection that blocks out all other possibilities.”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“S he had a nice ass”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“Marriage was nothing but a primitive form of torture;”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“She dimmed the computer screen, gathered up her papers, and placed them in a folder to the side of her desk. Uncle Harry was probably already there, draining his first scotch and antagonizing her mother. They tolerated one another for”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair

“yank; not hard enough, yank; breathe at all, yank, yank,yank! So, what was he going to tell Christine? He didn’t like being left to clean up messes; he wasn’t good at them. Creating the mess, now that was his specialty— trash it and duck out, move on to the next catastrophe. Nobody ever expected him to stay around and certainly not to figure a way out of something like this. Hell, no. But Christine was the one decent human being in this screwed-up world. Should he lie and buy a little time, maybe make her think this Desantro woman was”
― Mary Campisi, A Family Affair