Days of Awe Quotes

“It’s amazing, really, the things two people think they know about each other.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“This is the truth: You lose some things because you didn’t see the darkness rushing toward you. Some things disappear because it all snuck up on you so quickly and quietly, and you weren’t paying attention. Okay. But once in a while a loss is preventable. You can stop it. And if you don’t, you are to blame. The trick is knowing which is which.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“Love was foolish and inevitable. We were just waiting to be shattered by it. The days were finite, full of awe.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“He was fed up with me by then; I knew that: the way my sadness was a suit of armor. How securely I kept him out.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“In our marriage—in every marriage?—no annoyed glance holds only the displeasure of the moment. Each one reflects all the irritated glances he’s ever shot at me for all of my transgressions: for lacking discipline, for being brittle and sharp, for overreacting, for swearing all the time, even in front of Hannah, for letting my worst self porcupine out before I retract my quills. Every exasperated look Chris gives me—and there have been plenty—carries the sediment of all the displeasure that has accumulated over the past fifteen years.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“And here’s something else I learned: you lose some people that way—fast and blinding. But some people inch away from you slowly, in barely discernible steps. In the end it almost doesn’t matter. They’re just as gone.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“I was suddenly overwhelmed with the knowledge that this was a moment to pay attention to: this day, this air, these two people. I felt the perfection of the moment and, inside of it, I felt its demise.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“Maybe this is hell, I thought: alone in my house in the middle of the night, stuck in an endless loop of thermal discomfort.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“But would it be that easy? To adjust my lens a little? To stop wallowing in all this murky sorrow? To change my attitude, let the sunlight in, fix myself?”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“Can you love a work of art if the person who produced it was truly awful?”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“I’m just crying because when you eat a five-year-old, the portions are so small.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“I’m a refugee from happiness with nowhere else to go.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“We’re performing the steps of our oldest dance. And even in this strange, sad, suspended state, I know that we are elegant at it.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“Death smashes a crater into your life, and you’re left alone to sort through the rubble.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“That’s the way it is with certain people. They set their sights on you. They look at you straight on and they choose you, and they are dazzled by their own brilliant choice. It was the first time anyone had fallen in love with me like that. And I was powerless against it.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“This was what I loved about being a teacher, back then, when I loved it: that every child was some family’s most precious gem, the joy of their hearts, and I could see that, even sometimes when their own parents probably couldn’t; I could see that spark of perfection in every kid, in whatever form it took, a devious sense of humor or a disheveled sweetness, and I loved them all for it. They were grubby and loud and chaotic, and occasionally mean-spirited and dim-witted, sometimes feral and once in a while borderline psychotic. But they had beauty in them.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“And then the crack seals up and I’m back on familiar ground, and I remember to miss my friend, and I am relieved.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“We were supposed to weather the storms together, but we couldn’t…You’re not who I thought you were.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“Guess what a group of chickens is called?” he asked. “I do not know.” “Go on,” he said. “Guess.” “A bucket?”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“The thought of having to accumulate a new history with someone makes me feel uneven, as if my legs are two different lengths.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“Mrs. Beverly Jean Reinhoffer is our cat, of whom Chris has full custody. I never liked her and was glad to see her go.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“I’m trying,” he calls after me, and I want to say, Yes, you are. He’ll get up in a few minutes, put his clothes on, and get in his car and head to his apartment a mile from here, the two-bedroom on the East Side that I helped him pick out, near the lake and full of light, newly decorated with inexpensive but decent furniture and blue rugs and lots of pillows, and far too cozy to be as temporary as we agreed it was.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“You don’t have to call it ‘the apartment,’ ” I say, suddenly uncomfortably aware that I am standing next to our bed half naked and about to be abandoned by my sort-of-ex-husband whom I probably should not have just slept with. “Just say, ‘my apartment. I have to get back to my apartment.’ ”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“After a certain amount of time with someone, crisis is an aphrodisiac.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“Okay, I’ll admit that Chris and I still want each other. But need? Need is for your first lover on your twin bed in your college dorm.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“Isabel is a very talented photographer,” she says. “Indeed, I am! I like to take photographs of babies nestling in oversized teacups.” I spear a pea with my fork and hold it up. “Or sometimes I dress them in little green pea costumes and arrange them as if they’re peering out of gigantic pods.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe

“Hannah has gone over to her friend Delaney’s house. Hannah has a slew of friends with names like that, Delaney and Cassidy and Reilly, and even a tiny, owlish girl named O’Malley: names, it seems, that their parents plucked arbitrarily from the Boston phone book.”
― Lauren Fox, Days of Awe