Amends Quotes

“Nobody can make up for what they did. That isn't how it works. You did something better than that: You got to a place where even the terrible things you did became a . . . a place for repentance, and for someone to forgive you. That is much better than just getting back to the life before. I mean life before this happened just led to the things that happened. This way, the worst things you did became grace.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“Her voice became vibrant and raw, veined with passion. "You can never go back to the past. You can't heal their wounds or your own. Even God will not do this for you," and this was a bit controversial with her audience, but she believed she had proof: "Jesus himself was not healed--he came back from the dead with the wounds still in his hands and his body. He came back changed, but not healed. Saying 'I'm sorry' is saying that you will be different from now on. Your identity stretches to accomodate this thing you did to them. And in this way a relationship is formed between the person you have hurt and yourself.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“You are constantly looking for some solution, the thing you can do that will make you better and kinder and - and burn fifty pounds using this one weird trick. You're looking for the answer, like once you find it, getting your life in order will be easy. Stop looking for an answer and just do the things. Even when you don't know how.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“One is never sufficiently grateful for ordinary life; there's no time to notice it when it's happening.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“I was born in the wrong body. I'm actually, spiritually, a wolf. It's called being otherkin. It's very important for me to be open about it—coming out transformed my life, and my family. Our dog used to be terrified of storms and postal workers, but I was able to communicate with her, and now she's much more secure and self-grounded. I think of communication as my calling.” “Please”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“He had a dilapidated body and a face like the last days of the Raj: jowly, discredited, eager for the final defeat.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“When you say, 'I do,' you cannot be sincere, because you cannot know what you're doing. You may want some idea called 'being married' but you have no idea what being married will actually require of you. And so your sincerity and your strength of character don't really matter. If you are a morally weak person you can still marry. You don't have to wait until you're ready, because you're never ready. And so it is with 'I'm sorry.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“Applause washed toward her, liquid and sparkling. People in the audience held up their phones to take her picture, cameras held like candles. She had enough vanity left to wish for privacy. In heaven, she thought, tired and uncomforted, the lights will be even brighter.
Maybe there it will not be so bad to be seen for what we are.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“She kissed him then, with the same mixture of wonder and irony with which she kissed the cross in church. She didn't always understand that, either.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“Humility accepts submission to an outside standard. In private we can judge by private standards. We can say that other people just don't understand us.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“Medea and the sacred wolf, J. Malachi thought. Somebody help me, I'm going to rehab in a Greek myth.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“J. Malachi tried to count sheep, feeling that this was a practice which should be revived in the modern era, but he got bored after about seventy. This is what I get for being a deracinated postmodern, he thought. I've lost touch with the agricultural roots of culture.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“Sharptooth manages to live not even “one day at a time” but one moment at a time. The “now” is big enough for her. I wish I felt like it was big enough for me.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends