Rabbit Cake Quotes

“It's not easy to label people one illness or another. We're all different combinations of crazy.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“I’d figured out by now that death never makes sense, no matter how someone dies: murder, accident, old age, cancer, suicide, you’re never ready to lose someone you love. I decided death will always feel unexplained; we will never be ready for it, and you just have to do the best you can with what you have left.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“You want to defend those you love, even if the ones you love aren't very good all the time. And sometimes they're even downright awful.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“Dogs have a lot of things about life figured out; they aren’t afraid to let something go. Their hearts are always open to loving more.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“I worried I wasn’t normal because I felt sad, but not as sad as I wanted to feel, as sad as I thought someone with a dead mother should feel.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“I know most families don’t celebrate every new moon or every solstice and equinox, but maybe they should.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“Mom always said we needed a cake to mark every new beginning,”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“I wondered how many world records had gone unrecorded. How did you really know yours was the world record and not just the only one someone had bothered to write down?”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“Boomer died of old age, but I’d figured out by now that death never makes sense, no matter how someone dies: murder, accident, old age, cancer, suicide, you’re never ready to lose someone you love. I decided death will always feel unexplained; we will never be ready for it, and you just have to do the best you can with what you have left.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“Siblings of the mentally ill often ignore their own problems, and you’ve been conditioned to believe your needs are not important.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“up. I always felt as if I had swallowed something sharp, like a house key or a thumbtack, something causing a deep pain down in the pit of my stomach.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“I wondered what it had been like, to watch the girl die, to feel her spirit leave. I pictured a stream of birds flying from the girl’s open mouth after the seizure stopped, one bird after the next. The birds that had been in her brain could be free now, balancing somewhere on a black line of telephone wire.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“You’re selfish,” I spat. “You ruined my grieving chart. You distracted us from Mom’s death with your stupid sleepwalking, and now we’re going to be in mourning forever.” I pulled her hair harder.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“Fuck everyone.” It was something Lizzie would say, but it seemed like the right thing. “Let’s get chocolate milks. Come on.” “You’re the bravest girl I’ve ever met,” Jackie said, her eyes big and sweet like a sheep’s.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“Ms. Bernstein had explained that abnormal grieving means that nothing changes in the patient, nothing improves. If what Lizzie said was true, if we were all abnormal, we would be trapped here forever, stuck to grief like it was flypaper.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“Bears are omnivores, so we gave them buckets of vegetables and dog chow, a cattle leg bone to chew on, and a platter of several fish, salmon or trout. Our bears were well-fed, so they wouldn’t eat all of the fish, just the brains and skin, the fatty parts. A hungry bear will eat the entire fish, discarding only the intestines. It made me feel good that our bears never had to feel real hunger.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“Freedom, Alabama, wasn’t really the middle of nowhere. We had big fields and the woods, sure, and horses and cows, but if we drove half an hour to Auburn we had a mini-golf course, a mall, and both a Waffle House and a Red Lobster. We had a bowling alley and the water park, even if the water park had been closed last summer, and we had the second-largest zoo in Alabama. It wasn’t like we were Laura Ingalls Wilder or anything.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“felt jealous that Lizzie missed Mom so much that something physical was happening to her.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“Dad had wanted to cut that tree down, but Mom hadn’t let him because she liked the patterns the beetles made in the bark, their tunnels and elaborate mazes.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“I read through the DSM for Kids! while I waited. It was a list of all the things that could be wrong with a person, the disorders and phobias.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“She kept a small desk chair outside her door, which she called the waiting room. There was a bookshelf along the wall too, with titles like Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Kids!, The Secret Language of Eating Disorders, and Learning to Live with Your Demented Child.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“Ms. Bernstein explained that the grieving process takes eighteen months, and she drew a timeline on a piece of paper for me to take home.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“Maybe a spirit evaporates like vapor off the bag of frozen peas you steam in the microwave: the droplets go everywhere, settle wherever they land.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

“Sometimes animals could not be reintroduced into the wild because they’d lost their ability to hunt, had come to rely on humans for food. “A tame coyote is a dead coyote,” he explained. A tame coyote would go into a person’s backyard, and more than likely get shot. “It’s best if coyotes remain afraid of humans.” Dr.”
― Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake