After the Eclipse Quotes

“It was safer for certain people to think she'd had it coming to her; it made it easier to believe it wouldn't come for them.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“Almost worse than the sorrow of missing her was the fact that Mom's death had revealed everything to be meaningless. So much of what I'd thought was true had turned out to be an illusion. I saw people around me living by these illusions— that love and safety could be counted on, that life had meaning and the future could be controlled— and I did not feel that I could ever again share their suspended disbelief. I was swimming against a strong, cold current: I could see them there, playing on a sunny beach, but I couldn't rejoin them. Continuing the struggle seemed not only incredibly painful but, even worse, pointless.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“Cheryl Peters had already told me that the family next door, the third house I'd gone to, had also heard me and not opened the door. "They have two children," she said, matter-of-factly. But I was a child, too. Or at least I had been.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“Those fantasies, and that rage, eclipsed the grief and love I felt for my mother. My memories of her were becoming dimmer with time, and it was easier to feel fear and anger, because they seemed to have an endpoint: the trial, if it would ever come. Sadness was more dangerous, because I knew it would never end.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“I tried to be thankful that they had accepted this burden. But I didn't want to be accepted. I wanted to be wanted.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“And like many lies, this one revealed a wish. How lovely it would have been, I thought, to have had some time just to sink into misery. To not have to deal with family or school. To be surrounded by people whose job it was to keep you safe from your suicidal hand. And to have the circumstances of your life truly reflect what had happened to it. A mental hospital seemed to make a lot more sense than neat rows of chairs and desks, than football bleachers, than that white-lined running track.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“That moment was when I realized that I was wary of all men, not just those on the official suspect list. I had a deep conviction that anyone could do anything— knowing that people can kill is far different from seeing the proof. I had learned that humanity itself did not have limits. I knew the killer was a man because of the grunt I'd heard that night; so I knew that men, especially, were capable of anything. That night in the hotel, it wasn't so much that I thought my uncle might hurt me. It was that I didn't want to be vulnerable near that violent energy, however deeply buried it might be, however well checked. I thought it was possible that his shyness was a product of shame, or a subconscious disguise. I was sure there was no such thing as an entirely benevolent man.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“Grief requires imagination: mental images of the one you've lost, of the world that would have been... On the night Mom was killed, I was halted: imagination became a dangerous place, full of darkness and terror. Creativity would have taken energy I needed to survive. And so I could not write, and I could not remember, and I could hardly mourn, only fear.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“She looked to me as if she'd never been through anything more traumatic than someone fixing her coffee wrong, and I had nothing to say to her. That doctor lived in the same place my classmates did: an orderly universe governed by safety and logic. Her fancy degrees didn't change the fact that she was living a childish fiction.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“But it was impossible to share my feelings of grief with Peggy, because most of the time it was impossible to feel them. My sadness was overwhelmed by fear and visceral disgust and rage, rage so consuming and aimless that sometimes I was afraid of myself. I was convinced that the killer's fury had entered me, and would never leave. I knew that Peggy, my soft-bodied former babysitter, with her houseful of Precious Moments figurines, was not interested in hearing about my rage. She wanted to wipe away the tears of the cute little blond girl she had known. She didn't know what to do with my fear and rage, so she tried to will them to disappear, in favor of a gentler, more manageable sadness.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“I'd decided the goodness of people's hearts was their own business. I hadn't experienced any when I was knocking on those first four doors that night.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“Some were genuinely concerned; others made their offerings with a quavery touch of excitement that I was beginning to recognize as a desire to get closer to the drama. I was disgusted by this excitement. It made me angry, but it also made me afraid, less sure of who was really on my side.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“Mom's face healed soon enough, but her nose retained a slight bump from the break. I never got used to that bump; I felt uneasy when I caught it in profile. At the time, I didn't understand why this tiny disfigurement bothered me, but now it's clear. It was Mom's beauty that Teresa hated, that convinced her that Mom could disrupt her relationship with Tom. It was her beauty that she'd attacked so viciously, that she'd tried to stamp out. That bump on Mom's pretty face was a reminder that beauty wasn't only power. It was also danger.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“She was tired of shuffling around, of living in spaces owned by other people— a landlord would just be another man to whom she was beholden.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“I didn't want you to see her like that," and I feel the old anger: I already had seen her like that. Why is this so easy for them to forget? Their wishful amnesia may come from a place of love, but it makes me feel terribly alone.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“But I held back. I didn't want to horrify them. I was learning that there were silences now, unbridgeable spaces between myself and those around me.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“After a moment the silence was broken by a shrill scream threading up through the woods... Hysteria bounced among the voices, passed around in a cacophony of urgent cries. Each call vibrated in my limbs, echoed in my thumping blood...But there was a frenzied power to the sound that it couldn't be children, that the voices weren't just reacting but broadcasting. Long before I learned that it was the mating calls of loons that rang out all over the pond, those sounds reinforced something I already knew: that love can sound like insanity and rage.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“Mom wanted to be sure that I was nowhere near the potentially dangerous person, or anyone else Teresa might invite over to the apartment— she knew that people determined to live in darkness will always find each other.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“In the wake of a violent crime, people's deepest hopes and desires become a matter of official concern. Privacy erodes from day one.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“Sitting at my desk now, I pantomime this two-handed motion, shown to me by her fellow hand-sewers and friends. It's like a reverse butterfly stroke, an attempt at flight, at keeping your head above water.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“The worst part of feeling poisoned was that it seemed to wipe out anything in me that was gentle and intelligent and funny— all the things my mother had loved about me. I was devastated to think that if she had ever been able to come back, I might already be unrecognizable to her.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“All I knew was that it was not the shape of a restful body, that it looked unnatural in a way I didn't want to think too much about. She seemed exposed; all the other body bags I'd seen on the news had been flat. I hated the idea of thousands of television viewers being able to trace some curve of her, as though all the desirous eyes that had followed her in life would never cease looking.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“My mother was a very private person; exposure was the final indignity of her murder. Her violent end was illuminated in full detail for a hungry public. The curtains were stripped from her home; anyone could press their nose to the glass. But the beauty of her existence was not reported or filed, was not documented or reenacted on cable television; her light was blocked out by terror. I want to push away that darkness, to travel back through fear and reunite with her as she was before.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“I am tired of this impulse to wound myself so that I can prove that I'll heal.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“But a violent act is an epicenter; it shakes everyone within reach and creates other stories, cracks open the earth and reveals buried secrets.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“Nicole Brown Simpson died one month and one day after my mother. Her daughter was only eight, but I kept thinking she was twelve. Her neighbor found her, but I kept thinking her daughter had. I remember watching that slow-motion chase intently, hoping O.J. would follow through on his threats to kill himself. He entered my life, however distantly, just when I needed a killer upon which to focus my anger.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“Declare something weird and you don’t have to think much more deeply about it. It’s a word meant to shut a conversation down, push the scary thing away. I didn’t have that luxury. Even silence would have been better: to be struck dumb is to be affected. This is the difference between sympathy and empathy.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“For a brief time, Mom and I lived in a comfortable little kingdom all our own. We belonged to each other, in a way that's common to only daughters and single mothers, especially when both are young. These years later, I sit with a bag of letters and holiday cards that Mom collected, mostly ones I made her. They are always labeled FROM: SARAH. TO: MOM. I LOVE YOU! XOXOXO! My love for her was so strong that no expression ever seemed enough, prompting me to churn out these soft-leaved stacks of construction paper. Now there is no one left to cherish them but me. Young children are naturally effusive in their love for their mothers, but I had a fierce kind of love for her, an every-marker-in-the-box kind of love.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“others made their offerings with a quavery touch of excitement that I was beginning to recognize as a desire to get closer to the drama.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search