I've always had this in a kind of worst-case dark imagination. I want to know what the dark form in the window is. I want to know what the noise under the staircase is.
Uselessness, she thought, was the permanent condition of parenthood.
Emily thought maybe it was simpler than that: Some people gave money instead of love because it was all they had to give. A full bank account and a life of good deeds achieved with money didn’t mean a...
Give up, she wanted to tell them. You lost. The world is crap, and no amount of communicating is going to change it.
No one ever talks about issues like dissociative identity disorder, fugue, or psychotic breaks in anything but the most negative light. No one ever talks about how the personality does this type of th...
For a while, she’d held on to some illusion of control. And then, right about the time Ricky gave up his afternoon nap, she finally understood that for all the schedules and consistency, the rewards a...
Wasn’t there some belief about how if you drop a frog into boiling water, it will jump right out? But if you put it in cold water and turn up the heat gradually, it will allow itself to slowly cook to...
Counseling. She said that grief is not linear. It’s not a slow progression forward toward healing, it’s a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay pa...
She’d spun a web around Maggie’s son without his knowing it, without even perhaps her intention. Spider silk was stronger than chain if you happened to be a fly. There
Everyone always talks about how well mothers know their children. No one ever seems to notice how well children know their mothers.
Many people believe that evil is the presence of something. I think it's the absence of something.
It was so much simpler to see other people's wrongs and make them pay. It was so much harder to have compassion, to see yourself in others and find forgiveness.
The watercolor sky—silver fading to blue fading to black, the high slice of moon and glimmering stars—reminded her that she’d always wanted to paint but didn’t know how, was in some ways afraid of the...
When you start to really know someone, all his physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell in his energy, recognize the scent of his skin. You see only the essence of the person, n...
You can put on a mask and a costume for the rest of the world, but you can't hide from the people who changed your diapers.
Each of us extracted different people from our parents by our personalities and hence we had different experiences growing up.
It’s never one thing that leads to a tragic accident, she was sure she’d read once—though she couldn’t say where. It’s usually seven things—seven mistakes, or errors in judgment, or acts of negligence...
Memory is elastic, and no two people have the same version of any given event. Our versions of our own lives are necessarily fictional to some degree, wouldn't you agree?
Daily, she forgave his flaws, just as she knew he forgave hers. Maybe that alone was the foundation of a good marriage, an endless willingness to forgive and to love in spite of ourselves, an ability...
DEPRESSION IS NOT dramatic, but it is total. It’s sneaky—you almost don’t notice it at first. Like a cat burglar, it comes in through an open window while you’re sleeping. It takes little things at fi...
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