Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things Quotes

“We abide. To abide means to stand with someone, to suffer alongside someone. But it also means to live somewhere, and for me, abiding meant to live in that tender and tenuous place of knowing but not knowing. Knowing what would happen but not how it would happen. Knowing it would all end, but not what that ending would be like or how it would feel.”
― Amy Dickinson, Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Coming Home

“There are a lot of ways to be in a family. But here is how to BE a family: You have to spend time together. You have to try to be honest so that people trust you. You have to forgive others their failings and disappointments and ask for forgiveness for your own. You have to let things happen, to surrender to events, and accept that no matter what you do, life unspools anyway—whether you are alone and crying in your car, or holding hands with your beloved. You have to embrace those fleeting moments when everyone is healthy and happy. And sometimes, you have to make a spectacular celebration, just because you can.”
― Amy Dickinson, Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Coming Home

“There are lots of ways to be in a family. But here is how to BE a family: You have to spend time together. You have to try to be honest so that people trust you. You have to forgive others their failings and disappointments and ask for forgiveness for your own. You have to let things happen, to surrender to events, and to accept that no matter what you do, life unspools anyway--whether you are alone and crying in your car, or holding hands with your beloved. You have to embrace those fleeting moments when everyone is healthy and happy. And sometimes, you have to make a spectacular celebration, just because you can.”
― Amy Dickinson, Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Coming Home

“I was tempted to also burn Marie Kondo’s book, but even I cannot burn a book. Instead, I donated it to the library’s book sale. I imagine the book changing hands and continuing to inspire or disgust people until it, too, lands in a garbage bag and is finally discarded forever by someone for whom it does not spark joy.”
― Amy Dickinson, Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Coming Home

“Marie Kondo strikes me as a very strange person. I do not want to be like her. I also do not want to be like the ruthless and tidy monsters who follow her technique and roll their socks and stack their clothes sideways in drawers and who throw so much away.”
― Amy Dickinson, Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Coming Home