The Young Widower's Handbook Quotes

“Some (sea)shells have magic in them. If you listen really closely, you can hear voices from another world.”
― Tom McAllister, The Young Widower's Handbook

“The culture at large had exerted the same pressure on her that it exerts on all women, namely to feel insecure about herself regardless of what she was doing, to feel that simply by being a woman in the world she was necessarily doing something wrong and could only correct her wrongness via endless consumerism and an array of contradictory neuroses. She’d been socialized to always apologize, to smile when a man told her to smile, to believe men who told her she was doing something wrong. Before”
― Tom McAllister, The Young Widower's Handbook: A Novel

“Some things are meant to be temporal, he thinks, and there is a reason humans used to move on instead of clinging to every bond they’d ever formed. Nobody’s hands are big enough to hang on to every moment for eternity.”
― Tom McAllister, The Young Widower's Handbook

“The future is nothing but the steady unraveling of the order we try to impose on the present”
― Tom McAllister, The Young Widower's Handbook

“Grief begins as a temporary condition, but left untreated it becomes a permanent sickness.”
― Tom McAllister, The Young Widower's Handbook

“Your value does not derive from a list of completed tasks.”
― Tom McAllister, The Young Widower's Handbook

“Your value does not derive from a list of completed tasks”
― Tom McAllister, The Young Widower's Handbook

“They’re everywhere, these people who cannot function in the face of inconveniences, like long lines or a broken pair of sunglasses, people who explode into rages because someone ruined their picture in front of a historic monument, and when you see them, you think, what would these people do if they faced real trauma? How could they possibly survive an actual loss? Would they just stop breathing on the spot?”
― Tom McAllister, The Young Widower's Handbook: A Novel

“You need to allow her the freedom to go where she wants to go. If she wants to come back to you, she will. You can't force it on her. Her soul has to choose you.”
― Tom McAllister, The Young Widower's Handbook

“In a just world, couples would all have the opportunity to break down together.”
― Tom McAllister, The Young Widower's Handbook