Quotes from Jennifer Vandever

Someone has broken your heart. I knew there was something about you. That's it, isn't it?' A little," Sara said, suddenly self-conscious. I'm sorry.' It happens." She shrugged, straining for nonchalance. Maybe,' he said. 'But if it's your destiny, what can you do but accept it.

And who would advocate for her? Who would arrange her doctor appointments and throw out rotting bananas as she drifted into old age? Who would keep her photos, her jewelry, her horrible shadowboxes full of undergraduate angst, her hummingbird paintings, or even her tango shoes? Who would care about all the random junk she accumulated over the years and the stories that had attached to them?

That's just how it is. You get halfway through your life and realize you've done it all wrong. You've picked the wrong jobs and followed the wrong dreams. Every decision from your cradle to the counter of an upscale children's boutique in Portland, Oregon gratingly names little fig where you now stand tethered at the age of thirty-seven for thirteen-dollars-an-hour-plus-commission has been all wrong.

Listen. The world doesn't need any more babies. What is needs are women who don't spend all their time beating themselves up over shit they don't control.

But now she regarded her sister with curious distance. She'd been so actively excluded from everything important to her she felt suddenly, intensely alone.

How had it escaped her, Rosalind wondered. How had she never appreciated that her mother was a human being with her own desires and disappointments?

They didn't talk the way new lovers often do, sharing everything; they were selective and wary. Sometime it seemed to her their relationship was mostly physical, something she enjoyed.

you really got to do it--it's like you don't know what love is until you have a kid.

He turned to her and smiled. "OK. And you paint. Men come and go," he said, wagging a finger. "Be good to yourself. What you have? Inside? That's permanent. Any man doesn't see that, doesn't deserve you.

After she packed her few bags into the back of her car and hugged him, Rosalind never saw him again. After a few weeks it was like she'd never known him at all, like summer friendships she'd strike up as a child when the family stayed a few weeks at the beach or another city. The friendship was site specific. She couldn't miss it any more than she'd miss the Eiffel Tower in her backyard. It was where it belonged, somewhere in the past.

Richard and I always called you the punisher. We never had to discipline you. Not like we did Hermione or Polly. Because you were so hard on yourself. If there's anything I want for you now, as a mother, even if I don't 'deserve' it is: I want you to be gentle. I want you to have compassion. For yourself and everyone. It's what every parent wants. If their any good. Which maybe I wasn't...

The Friday afternoon of a teenager--had anything more wonderful existed?

Remember the good times---you'll need them during the bad," a family friend had boozily warned her at their wedding.

They smiled awkwardly and hugged again. Rosalind thought briefly to ask when they'd stopped being necessary to each other, when she had become another obligation to fill like their parents or Polly.

It's the worst feeling," she said staring off vaguely, lost in another decade, "it's really the most shattering moment when you stop being enchanting to someone else. You're suddenly,,,just this person. And so is he.

She realized children shouldn't be thought of as mere post-mortem media storage sites, but really, where on earth was she going to unload all her earthly crap if not upon someone biologically required to care?