The Kindest Lie Quotes

“A lie could be kind to you if you wanted it to be, if you let it.”
― Nancy Johnson, The Kindest Lie

“What went on in his mind belonged to him, no guardrails, no judgment from the grown-ups, no rules to break, just a private space in a cluttered world that was his and his alone.”
― Nancy Johnson, The Kindest Lie

“...a lifetime of lies never added up to anything good. A lifetime of doing the wrong things for the right reason. A lifetime of lies that started small, like a nick in the windshield, then eventually shattered the glass.”
― Nancy Johnson, The Kindest Lie

“For her, love had always been about holding on too tight. She could never get the grip just right.”
― Nancy Johnson, The Kindest Lie

“Men kept their hurt tucked away deep on the inside. If it rose high enough to spill out of them, they ran it off on the basketball court, drowned it in a bottle, or buried it deep inside a woman. But they rarely talked about it.”
― Nancy Johnson, The Kindest Lie

“Perfect mothers didn't exist, only perfectly flawed ones did.”
― Nancy Johnson, The Kindest Lie

“No one talked about what happened in the summer of 1997 in the house where Ruth Tuttle had grown up.

And at the start of this new year, Ruth imagined the ancestors dancing somewhere right along with them.”
― Nancy Johnson, The Kindest Lie

“There’s no right way to be a mother. You do what you know how to do at the time and pray it all comes out okay in the end. I think of it like baking a cake. You pour all your best ingredients in the bowl. Flour, sugar, eggs, and real butter—no yogurt or applesauce substitutes, either. You mix it real good and then put it in the oven and you wait for it to rise. Take it out too early, it won’t be done, or it may fall.”
― Nancy Johnson, The Kindest Lie

“As much as Ruth wanted to believe that better days lay ahead, she left church more confused than convicted.”
― Nancy Johnson, The Kindest Lie

“She knew they still had unfinished business and a lot to work through to make things right again. But maybe it wasn't about going back to some earlier point in time in their marriage. Maybe you just continued wherever you were, wiser from all you knew, stronger from all the burdens you'd carried.”
― Nancy Johnson, The Kindest Lie

“He said he drove up there to march with them holding a sign that screamed in bold letters I AM A MAN. Every time he talked about it, Ruth thought there was something screwed up about a world where a man needed to carry a sign to remind the world and maybe even himself that he was indeed a man.”
― Nancy Johnson, The Kindest Lie

“Everyone simple knew it, with the certainty of new mornings dawning and darkness eclipsing the day.”
― Nancy Johnson, The Kindest Lie