The Other Wife Quotes

“Hope blinds you.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“always wanting something different than what was there. Never wanting to be where I was. It got to be an everyday pain, like walking around on a broken leg you don’t even notice”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“Funny how when the words run out, in lust or in shock or in grief, we call to a God we don’t believe in any more.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“As if an affair was a lightning strike, a burst tyre, a heart attack. Something that could not be predicted or avoided, rather than two people making a choice to do it, act on it.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“She shook her head in the Raisa Gorbachev-style fur hat she’d taken to wearing. Those Russian women, they knew how to deal with cold, and that was by throwing all sense of fashion out the window and essentially going out dressed as a bed.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“You so much want to believe that what they tell you is true, you do the lying for them.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“I’ve kind of come to realise that we’re all just doing the best we can. No one really means to mess up, or hurt other people.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“if you admit to friends how unhappy you are, you have to admit it to yourself as well.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“It was crazy, the prisons that people made in their minds. Suzi was an educated middle-class woman, with a living, affluent mother, who perhaps was not the most supportive, but would hardly turn her daughter out on to the street. The law was there to protect her, make sure she wouldn’t get kicked out of the marriage with nothing. So what was she so scared of? The loss of social standing, the failure of a divorce, perhaps the loneliness, raising her child alone? I wished I could tell her how insignificant these things were, compared to what other pain life had up its sleeve.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“spilt-second decision,”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“It was a good way to take stock of your life, wondering who might come to find you if you went missing.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“The terrible adaptability of human minds.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“I summoned all my courage, which I had learned was so very meagre, and got ready to crack the thin glass between us, the pretence of being just alright that could have carried us through the next fifty years if I’d let it.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“I had forgotten what I was capable of, all the different people that lurked inside of me.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“It turned out there were varying degrees of alright.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“It’s a strange experience, hearing your spouse talk to a complete stranger. You want to shout out, That isn’t true! You never told me that! Like a test you don’t understand why you’re failing.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“We were good at doing what happy couples did. Maybe no one was really happy. Maybe everyone was just copying it off TV and films.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“Loneliness can make you do mad things.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“kettle on the Aga. The room was freezing, despite the fancy new underfloor heating,”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“be”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“I knew him – he did nothing but lie. The whole time. Where he was, how old he was, who he was seeing . . . He was a fantasist, I suppose you’d call it. So no, I haven’t spoken to him in years, and I’m glad.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“Everything I had known, everything I’d built my life on was a lie. I had not known my husband at all. I had not known anything.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“The idea that Patrick had only married me for my money, that any love between us had been faked, was unendurable.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“I realised now that some people were just so good at lying that you not only believed them, you actually did your best to. You so much want to believe that what they tell you is true, you do the lying for them.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“I realised now that some people were just so good at lying that you not only believed them, you actually did your best to.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“But those moments, when I managed not to think about the truth . . . it was that I missed more than anything.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“they would always have been under the guise of romance, or protectiveness, or love. So that the woman – and I was sure there would be several – would never tell anyone, certain that the problem was with her. Sure that she was somehow defective, as he kept on telling her. Believing she was going crazy when he denied the truth of her eyes and ears.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“This was not my life, and yet here I was stuck in it.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“there is nothing so lonely as a secret you can’t share,”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife

“But that’s the thing about rock-bottom. It gives you something firm to put your feet on, at last.”
― Claire McGowan, The Other Wife