Annie's Ghosts Quotes

“Just as secrets have a way of breaking loose, memories often have a way of breaking down. They elude us, or aren’t quite sharp enough, or fool us into remembering things that didn’t quite happen that way. Yet much as a family inhabits a house, memories inhabit our stories, make them breathe, give them life. So we learn to live with the reality that what we remember is an imperfect version of what we know to be true.”
― Steve Luxenberg, Annie's Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret

“Secrets, I've discovered, have a way of working free of their keepers.”
― Steve Luxenberg, Annie's Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret

“Without really trying, I have become a collector of other families' secrets. Whenever I tell someone about my detective work, the first question is invariably something like this: 'Can you tell me the secret?' Sure, I say. The next question often is: 'Want to hear my family's secret?”
― Steve Luxenberg, Annie's Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret

“Stories rarely begin at the beginning, but every storyteller has to begin somewhere, and Anna chooses to start this story with shame.”
― Steve Luxenberg, Annie's Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret

“But what do I believe?”
― Steve Luxenberg, Annie's Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret

“The Age of Schizophrenia” (an essay bemoaning the ever-growing numbers of patients with that specific diagnosis, a widely discussed trend in the late 1930s) and “But Is the World Going Mad?” (an essay arguing that the ever-growing number of patients in mental hospitals was not cause for alarm, but rather proof of psychiatry’s progress in identifying and treating mental illness), I come away with a strong feeling that Mom’s worries about mental illness in her own family would have centered around two popular notions from that era:”
― Steve Luxenberg, Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret