The Law of Loving Others Quotes

“It will take so long for you to understand this, but you can’t punish yourself for someone else’s pain. You have to learn to separate, to draw boundaries. It’s the hardest thing, loving your mother. It’s the most profound and heartbreaking, the most important, love of my life. But I also couldn’t let it define me. I had another daughter. I had grandchildren. I had my own sense of self. And now I have Saul too.”
― Kate Axelrod, The Law of Loving Others

“And I thought about how easy it was to view someone else’s future in a way that was so optimistic and full of hope. Why did it feel impossible to do the same about my own?”
― Kate Axelrod, The Law of Loving Others

“And this was something I would always wonder about—how the lines were drawn to define mental illness. When did a little depression become pathological? When did anxiety turn into something bigger, something greater and more cautionary about your own stability?”
― Kate Axelrod, The Law of Loving Others

“Winter in Pennsylvania was bleak, but still there was something beautiful in its nearly silent emptiness.”
― Kate Axelrod, The Law of Loving Others

“Earlier that morning I’d been flipping through the pages of Anna Karenina, and I came across this sentence toward the end: But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable. There was such a comfort in those words. Yes, it was impossible to control whom I loved and why, and just as my family had no choice but to love my mother, I had not chosen whatever complicated feelings I felt for Daniel or Phil. There was nothing to be done about that. All I could do was try my best to navigate through the tangled mess of loss and longing.”
― Kate Axelrod, The Law of Loving Others

“What did that mean? I analyzed it from a hundred different angles. A smile seemed so loaded. Had my mother recognized him? Was she happy? Or was she lost, and smiling at a faraway thought in her head? Was it a simple,”
― Kate Axelrod, The Law of Loving Others

“How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult—what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and self-delusion love appears to be—if you are not!”
― Kate Axelrod, The Law of Loving Others

“Maybe he was just really in love with her, despite her illness, and wanted to be with her.”
― Kate Axelrod, The Law of Loving Others

“I called Daniel, promised myself that if he picked up I wouldn’t see Phil. But Daniel didn’t answer, and I texted Phil back right away.”
― Kate Axelrod, The Law of Loving Others

“That he had a beard seemed like some symbol of his manliness. I tried to control the impulse to compare Daniel and Phil, but it was difficult.”
― Kate Axelrod, The Law of Loving Others

“(that was so the kind of thing she would do, not smoke a joint, but a blunt).”
― Kate Axelrod, The Law of Loving Others

“I groaned. “I hate that. I hate girls who hate girls.”
― Kate Axelrod, The Law of Loving Others

“A bowl of pistachio nuts sat on the coffee table and I took a handful, tried to crack the shells open into my lap. Daniel took the tough ones and pried them open with his teeth, lovingly spitting the meat into my palms.”
― Kate Axelrod, The Law of Loving Others

“I felt as though I might be sick and I wondered if this was the moment that I’d look back on and know, irrefutably, that everything had changed. I wished that I could’ve somehow held onto and savored the ordinariness of the past few days.”
― Kate Axelrod, The Law of Loving Others