Deb Caletti

“The world was large, so large. Bigger than it had been before. Family, too, a bigger word. That felt like a good thing. An essential thing. There was power in numbers.”

“But, finally, I had to open my eyes. I had to stop keeping secrets. The truth, thankfully, is insistent. What I saw then made action necessary. I had to see people for who they were. I had to understand why I made the choices I did. Why I had given them my loyalty. I had to make changed. I had to stop allowing love to be dangerous. I had to learn how to protect myself. But first… I had to look”

“I finally learned that it was all right to say something wasn’t working for me when it wasn’t working. The world doesn’t come crashing down when you speak the truth.”

“We look down our noses at people who've made mistakes in relationships. She's so stupid! How could she do that! Our superiority makes us feel better. But I’d bet everything I have on the fact that people to claim to have a perfect record in love are either lying or have very limited dating experience. People who say, I’d never do that! Someday, unless you are very, very lucky, you’ll have a story to tell. Or not to tell.”

“I began to learn the importance of lifting things up and looking underneath.”

“Love was also an easy word, used carelessly. Felons and creeps could offer it coated in sugar, and users could dangle it so enticingly that you wouldn't notice that it had things attached - heavy things, things like pity and need, that were weighty as anchors and iron beams and just as impossible to get out from underneath.”

“Sometimes good choices are really bad ones, wrapped up in so much fear you can't even see straight.”

“Maybe it was wrong, or maybe impossible, but I wanted the truth to be one thing. One solid thing.”

“You were a stone wall, a fort in high,unreachable trees, an island, my own island, that no boat could reach.”

“A person could leave you so quickly. So much history and time and memories, but they snuck away from you, and other things took their place. How could you hold on? Wait. A bigger question. The biggest. How could you hold on andlet go?”

“Stories help you understand your life,she’d say. Stories can heal. And I think she’s right, because why do old guys back from the war tell their experiences again and again? Why did people of long ago make up elaborate tales of mythical beings? Why do people sit in a room and reveal the pieces of their life to doctors trained to listen, and why are they cured by doing that? Whylibraries? Come on, all those stories, pieces of life told again and again. We need them. Stories are a ritual that put all the crazy shit about life into a form that makes sense. We’re all like the little kids that need to be read the same story over and over again.”

“Maybe sometimes you just feel like everything can be taken from you all at once.”

“Beaches, music, and car rides—they could all bring on a sudden bout ofdeep, dreamy thoughts.”

“Sometimes I’ve even wished there was a human pause button, where you could choose some point in your life where you could stay always.”

“Maybe some people just had trouble with forever.”

“He's all right. He's fine," Dad says, his usual line whenever Oliver gets hurt. It means: Go away. Don't baby him. Don't show too much compassion. The other dads do this too. It's some kind of group hysteria, based on some fatherly fear that says compassion equals homosexuality.”

“What happened?" I ask. My heart hurts."That big guy," he says. His voice is high and tight. "Number forty-six. Jeez, he just bashed his shoulder right into my chest, and when I was on the ground, he steps on my leg with his cleat." He sniffs hard, rubs his nose on his sleeve, doesn't meet my eyes."That bastard," I say. "The minute he gets off the field I'm going to kick him in the balls." Oliver laughs a little, his eyes filling up at the same time. "He'll never know what hit him. His balls are gonna go flying, I promise you that. People will wish they brought their catcher's mitts.”

“No one is ever quite as strong or as weak as you'd think.”

“It was possible, maybe, to have facts in your mind that weren't facts at all. You could build a whole life's story on false assumptions. You could make truths out of untruths and untruths out of truths. Until you spoke them, really said them out loud or checked for sure, you may not have known which were which.”

“Control was just wishful thinking, and you controlled things to hedge your bets, to be safe, to guard against loss.”

“Maybe we all just wanted someone to believe in. That's all each of us wanted, and it should be so simple, but it never was simple.”

“I had let want in, opened the door ever so slightly. But want without the belief you can get what you want is pointless. You have to hope, so I let that in too. You have to. To want things and go for them and believe, even in impossible situations...Hope was what you had when you had nothing else. Hope was the perfect shiny top on the Christmas tree, the glowing halo of every wish, the endless beacon of a lighthouse bringing tormented ships home at last.”

“Being needed was a handy trick. It could fill you up so full you never even noticed all the places that were empty.”

“I'd always thought telling the truth to other people was hard, but maybe that was a snap compared to telling the truth to yourself. Sometimes we just refused to know what we knew.”

“I could forget that part, but it had to have been true.”

“A relationship could be a place to hide too.”

“Flawed Human Parents + Shit Life Throws At You = Childhood That 'Builds Character.”

“she wonders if we feel more regret for the things we do or for the things we didn't do”

“The most insane things can become normal if you have them around you long enough. A mind can’t seem to hold anything too crazy for too long without finding a way to make it seem normal.”

“Because that’s how it works after something terrible has happened. You know this is true if something terrible has ever happened to you. A thousand objects take on new meaning. Everything is a reminder of something else.”

“It was a shut door, and shut doors meant things kept to yourself. There were reasons you kept things to yourself, and they usually weren’t good, happy, open-air sort of reasons. Still, I didn’t want to see behind that door. You think you want to know everything there is to know about everything there is to know. But you don’t. Not really. I had pried the lid off of the dark places of another person before, I had seen inside. Down deep. You don’t want to look at what’s rotting there.”

“Usually you just walk and walk among people who are not of your tribe, and then suddenly, there you are, in a place that feels familiar and known.”

“Whipped cream can remind you why it's good to be alive.”

“Love." She looked at me with those blue eyes. "Isn't it astonishing how confused and complicated such a small,simple word is? It attracts so many other things, doesn't it, that stick to it like barnacles on rock...fear, guilt. Need. You can't even see the rock anymore. I imagine love in its purest form is a rare thing.”

“Nice isn't the same as good," he said. "People are 'nice' for a million of reasons. 'Nice' is the outside. What people get to see. What you want people to see. 'Good' is the inside. And this is a bad person, C. He's making you a fucking prisoner and your letting him”

“Shakti always said we should have a guy we wanted to keep shaving our legs for. I knew what she meant." pg. 129”

“You've got to say what you mean and mean what you say...Doubt in your voice is an open door people will shove right through.”

“You could try and understand people, you could read books and understand words and concepts and ideas, but you could never understand enough or have enough knowledge to keep away the surprises that both fate and human beings had in store.”

“Truth was funny, because it was an insistent thing, maybe as powerful and insistent as some force of nature, the push of water or wind. You could keep it out only so long, but it had its own will and its own needs, and maybe you could keep it at bay with lies, but not for long, not for always.”

“It was practically un-American to not set goals and then do everything you could, everything, to reach them. Quitting-it was a dirty word...”

“Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them.”

“If you don't participate, you're just taking up oxygen. (Bunny)Life is a banquet. Approach it with hunger. (Chuck)”

“Maybe we all just want to feel special, even for a little while, to be fooled for a bit into feeling something besides the truth of our own ordinariness.”

“We should have the right to have someone leave when we want, to only allow those in who we want in. But the truth is, people can force their way into your life whenever they choose. If they want to remind you forevermore that they exist, they will. They can reappear in a card or call or a "chance" meeting, they can remember your birthday or the day you met with some innocuous small note. No matter how little they matter in your new life, they can insist on being seen and recognized and remembered.”

“It’s funny the ways we try to punish ourselves when we feel we’ve committed some crime.”

“A lot of life is just surviving what happens.”

“A person who says "it's your decision" is informing you that your decision sucks.”

“Sometimes you build up these walls, you build and you build and you build up these walls and you think they’re so strong, but then someone can come along and tip them over with only his fingers, or the weight of his breath.”

“I tended to give a book a chance and another chance and another, sometimes seeing it all the way to the end, still hoping for for it turn out different. Maybe I was confused about what you owed a book. What you owed people, for that matter, real or fictional.”

“Because words were hills and valleys you traveled, so lovely sometimes that they hurt your eyes.”