Old age had distilled her down to her essence.
Nothing had just happened to her, she had made a choice, and then she had made another and another after that. Taken together, the small choices anyone made added up to a life.
It wasn't right that you could only understand your parents' pain once you'd experienced the things they had, and by then they were gone.
Each of Nora's children had arrived on this earth as him or herself, the more she knew them, the more she felt it to be true. They were so different from one another, and from her.
Like Ronald Reagan said, trust but verify.
For everything that was wrong with men.
In high school, during marathon phone conversations, cheap pizza dinners and long suburban car rides, I began to fall for boys because of who they actually were, or at least who I thought they might b...
She had learned over time that to know anything was bearable. It was secrecy that could not be borne.
With the Smithies, it was different. There was sometimes no telling where one of them began and the others left off.
What would you have today if you woke up with only the things you thanked God for yesterday? He wondered
The moment a woman was born determined so much of who she was allowed to become.
He existed, then he didn’t. The world spins on, indifferent to the mess.
Someone could save your life without you ever knowing it. It happened more than most people realized.
Vielleicht war das Bild, das die eigene Familie von einem hatte, zu sehr mit ihren Hoffnungen und Ängsten vermischt, als dass sie einen jemals wirklich als die Person sehen konnten, die man war.
People wanted you to validate their choices by doing the same thing they had done.
One of life's contradictions: how human beings were at once entirely resilient and impossibly fragile. One decision could stay with you forever, and yet you could live through almost anything.
Maggie wondered if in some ways all the complaining only made matters worse.
Even if there was no God there was always the ocean- before you and after you, breathing in and out for all eternity.
And then there were the things Sally knew her mother would have loved. Those, too, made it easy to imagine how she might come back to life, since nothing good seemed quite real without her there to ap...
Gilot
