The truth about your own life is not always easy to accept, and sometimes hasn’t even occurred to you.
Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.
We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming.
When someone asks you where you come from, the answer is your mother... When your mother’s gone, you’ve lost your past. It’s so much more than love. Even when there’s no love, it’s so much more than anything else in your life. I did love my mother, but I didn’t know how much until she was gone.
But no one ever leaves the town where they grew up, not really, even if they go.
I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel.
There comes that moment when we finally know what matters and, perhaps more important, what doesn’t, when we see that all the life lessons came not from what we had but from who we loved, and from the failures perhaps more than the successes.
Charm is like tinsel without the tree. What’s tinsel without the tree? Shredded tinfoil.
Maybe everyone stays the same inside, even when their life looks nothing like what they once had, or even imagined.
People go through life thinking they are making decisions, when they’re really just making plans, which is not the same thing at all. And along the way, they get a little damaged, lots of tiny cracks, holding together but damaged still.
Maybe when you were a kid you were so unsure of yourself that every school year was a time of reinvention; maybe only adults were stupid enough to think they knew exactly who they were.
It’s a complicated relationship, being a good grandparent, because it hinges on a series of other relationships... Because being a grandparent is determined by the relationship your child has with you, partly determined by the one a son or daughter has with his or her spouse, partly determined by the relationship you have with the person your child has chosen to have a child with.
Because I’m learning that being a grandmother is not about the things you have to do. It’s about the things you want to do. The fact is that motherhood is mainly about requirements.
She is a prisoner in the amber of her own past.
It was easy to figure out how people ought to behave out in the world if you never went out in the world yourself.
It’s so much easier, to learn to love what you have instead of yearning always for what you’re missing, or what you imagine you’re missing. It’s so much more peaceful.
Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel. Or maybe they just help me while away the hours as the rain pounds down on the porch roof, taking me away from the gloom and on to somewhere sunny, somewhere else.
People froze you in place. More important, you froze yourself, often into a person in whom you truly had no interest.
Mrs. Blessing was surprised at how fluently she lied, much better than she’d done it years before, when it had been so much more important, at least to her. She realized that lying was easier than telling the truth because it had such nice smooth edges, not jagged with impossibility and inconvenience the way the truth so often was.
So much of friendship is about being in the right place at the right time.