The best lies are the ones that are wrapped around a core of truth.
What we could not see clearly, we didn’t have to pretend to understand.
Sometimes you can’t tell how consuming love is until you can see its absence.
I’ve come to see that ignorance is a privilege, too.
Just because you can’t see the wound doesn’t mean it isn’t hurting.
The brain can do a lot of things, Olive said, but it can’t distinguish between what’s really happening and what you’re imagining. That’s why scary movies scare you and why you cry at Nicholas Sparks books.
Just because you leave someone doesn’t mean you ever let them go. Even when you couldn’t see me, you knew deep down I was still there.
Sometimes you can’t tell how consuming love is until you can see its absence. Sometimes you can’t recognize love because it’s changed you, like a chimera, so slowly that you didn’t witness the transformation.
Being a mother gives you a singular sort of vision, a prism through which you can see your child with many different faces all at once. It is the reason you can watch him shatter a ceramic lamp, and still remember him as an angel.
No matter how many times you let someone go, it never got any easier.
Louie believed that those white men with their signs and slogans were not really there for the unborn, but there for the women who carried them. They couldn’t control women’s sexual independence. To them, this was the next best thing.
It’s silly to anthropomorphize bread, but I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama, in order to evolve. I have to admit, I often feel that way myself.
The terrible thing about falling in love is that real life always gets in the way.
The bottom line,” Seven explained last night, “is that we never fall for the people we’re supposed to.
When I run across something so incredible that I want to show it to someone else. The problem is, when you make the choice to be a loner, you lose that privilege.
My father died last year,” Thomas said. “I still look for him in crowds.” “I’m sorry.” He shrugged. “I think grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room – but eventually, you learn to live with it.
You can’t create life in a place that’s dying by degrees.
Although I am nine months pregnant, although I have had plenty of time to dream, I have not really considered the specifics of this child. I have thought of this daughter only in terms of what she will be able to do for the daughter I already have.
He shrugged. ‘I think grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room – but eventually, you learn to live with it.’ Somehow, I thought, elephants had taken it a step further. They didn’t grimace every time they entered the room and saw that couch. They said, ‘remember how many good memories we had here?’ And they sat, for just a little while, before moving elsewhere.
I know that some neurologists think that autistic kids have brain synapses so close together and firing in such quick succession that they cause hyperawareness; that one of the reasons children on the spectrum rock or stim is to help them focus instead of having all sensations bombard them at once. I think clairvoyance isn’t really all that much different. In all probability, neither is mental illness.