Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.
I think that if you’re somebody who’s a control freak, the process would make you crazy, but I’m kind of a process freak, so I’m excited to see what he does with it. I know it’s not going to be my book, so just starting with that knowledge frees me from having to get all freaked out about it.
You’re not supposed to look back, you’re supposed to keep going.
People grow up by living.
I was trying to prove to them and to myself that I was still who I had always been. I was beautiful, if fat. I was smart, if loud. I was good, if ruined.
I would like to tell you that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe.
It’s very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.
Stones and bones; snow and frost; seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Daddy misses! His two little frogs of girls, that’s who. They know where they are, do you, do you?
I wanted to be the moron of the family, because morons seemed to have more fun, more freedom and more personality.
Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.
As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.
He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.
But also I wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was granted one weak grace. Back in the room where the green chair was still warm from his body, I blew that lonely, flickering candle out.
I tried to take solace in Holiday, our dog. I missed him in a way I hadn’t yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound silly but I didn’t believe it, would not believe it.
Well, as my dad would say, it means she’s out of this shithole.
Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.
She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything.
Every day a question mark.
He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.
The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was away. But when people left they always came back.