She is like a child picking at a scab, unable to stop herself even though she knows it will hurt.
I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I’d like to be known.
We women. as glue for the family. lead lives that are important and conflicted. What we women choose to give up for our families is important and valid.
She’d been criticized for holding the reins of parenthood too tightly, of controlling her children too completely, but she didn’t know how to let go. From the moment she’d first decided to become a mother, it had been an epic battle.
No mother. Two small words, and yet within them lay a bottomless well of pain and loss, a ceaseless mourning for touches that were never received and words of wisdom that were never spoken. No single word was big enough to adequately describe the loss of your mother.
It was true; always had been. Friendships were like marriages in that way. Routines and patterns were poured early and hardened like cement.
She used to tell me that she couldn’t feel the sunlight anymore, not even when she was standing in it, not even when it was hot on her cheeks.
If she wasn’t careful, she’d slide without a ripple into the gently flowing stream of her old life, pulled back under the current without a wimper of protest. Another housewife lost in the flow.
And no one drank just one shot of tequila.
This is the problem with forever friends. They know too much.
It’s not intentions that matter. It’s actions. We are what we do and say, not what we intend to.
Promises were a lot like impressions. The second one didn’t count for much.
Nothing was easier to shatter than the fragile shield of an idealist.
The heat made people crazy. They woke from their damp bedsheets and went in search of a glass of water, surprised to find that when their vision cleared, they were holding instead the gun they kept hidden in the bookcase.
Of course you can fall in love. You just have to let yourself. They don’t call it falling for nothing. -Kate.
At one point, she’d wanted to hurl the whole breakfast at the wall. And then she’d remember why it was that men had temper tantrums and women didn’t: cleanup.
Popularity means people think they know you.
I guess no one stays friends for more than thirty years without broken hearts along the way.
Hands down, the hardest part for me is coming up with an idea. I spend about 14 months writing a book, and that’s a lot of hours spent thinking about a single project. I simply have to love the idea. I’ll go through dozens of workable ideas until I find the one that lights my fire.
Thoughts – even fears – were airy things, formless until you made them solid with your voice and once given that weight, they could crush you.