Abigail Thomas Quotes

Happy, for instance, once meant luck. Not good luck or bad, just luck. Look what we have done to ourselves. We think we can actually pursue happiness.

The past is in the wastebasket.

You had a certain way of saying my name. It was the inflection maybe, something you put into those three syllables. And now you are gone and my name is just my name again, not the story of my life.

Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn't work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might; often you need to take the long way around. And if you're writing memoir yo...

She would (if she could) put her arm around the girl she'd been and try to tell her Take it easy, but the girl would not have listened. The girl had no receptors for Take it easy. And besides, Hey Jud...

Looks as if I have an open umbrella concealed under my skirt. How did that happen?

Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn’t work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might;

So instead of not-writing, I am painting. I’m not a painter, but I make paintings anyway. I use glass and oil-based house paint, which is toxic, and which you can’t buy just anywhere anymore. It’s bei...

THERE ARE ENORMOUS HOLES IN MY EDUCATION. I left college in March of my freshman year and never went back. I’ve never read Moby-Dick and it’s probably too late now. I know nothing about the history of...

But we don't get to choose what sticks. How many times I have run my fingers along a picket fence and thought, This! I will remember this moment always! and all that remains is the memory of a desire...

Love Love can accommodate all sorts of misshapen objects: a door held open for a city dog who runs into the woods; fences down; some role you didn’t ask for, didn’t want. Love allows for betrayal and...

The connection with him is a connection with part of myself, and it has to do with a kind of insatiable curiosity. I mean the part of me that gets connected to the rest of me when I’m connecting to hi...

Drip and fling and pour color onto the glass. Then I push the paint around. You have to have some faith. If it looks like nothing, if you think you’ve destroyed what might have been a good painting, k...

I have decided that when I’m dead I’d like my body in the woods under a light coating of leaves. That being against the law, maybe I will go for cremation. I ask Chuck what he wants done with his rema...

I can never make the same painting twice, not that I want to, I guess. Still, it would be nice to make a better version of something, or try it in different colors, but I never remember how I did it,...

But when it gets dark, I’m off the hook. The day is officially rolled up and put away. I’m free to watch movies or stare at the wall, no longer holding myself accountable for what I might or might not...

And you have to take gladly what life offers, she has learned that much, and sometimes you get lucky. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there? There’s nothing wrong with that.

Grief is not a pleasure, but it makes me remember, and I am grateful.

Death is both a certainty and an unknown, Chuck says. It's hard to get a grip on it.

For better or for worse, but not for lunch,...