Quotes from Michelle Richmond

You find a way, somehow to get through the most horrible things, things you think would kill you. You find a way and you move through the days, one by one, in shock, in despair, but you move. The days pass, one after the other, and you go along with them - occasionally stunned, and not entirely relieved, to find that you are still alive.

To be a writer you have to write -- and no academic degree is going to do the writing for you.

Some people have a gift for making you feel okay, just by the fact of their presence.

It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character.

I have a hunch that our obsession with photography arises from an unspoken pessimism; it is our nature to believe the good things will not last. . . But photos provide a false sense of security> like our flawed memory, they are guaranteed to fade. . . . We take photographs in order to remember, but it is in the nature of a photograph to forget (pg 157)

A story, after all, does not only belong to the one who is telling it. It belongs, in equal measure, to the one who is listening.

As the years progress and we experience more and more, the mini-narratives that make up our lives are distorted, corrupted, so that every one of us is left with a false history, a self-created fiction about the live we have led. pg 163

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.

It's the direction the feet are pointing—not the hands—that indicates a person's true interest.

We tend to see life as a continuum, but really, it's a series of phases, generating a series of different selves. You leave one life behind and start another. And each time, a different version of yourself emerges.

The guilty always find a way of rationalizing their behavior, making it sound as though they've done you a favor.

Tragedy, in its full and life-altering form, happened to other people.

I never expected to find myself here, on the edge of the continent--childless, possibly jobless, with broken bones and a broken marriage, citizen of a broken country. But here I am, and I must make something of it. That's really the only choice one has: make something of it, or don't.

I understand how families become estranged, not by design, but by embarrassment. You come to a point when so much time has passed that it seems impossible to make the first move

Most married couples report being happiest during their third year of marriage.

I expected marriage to be a door that we went through. Like a new house, you step into it, expecting it to be an unchanging space to inhabit. But, of course, I was wrong. Marriage is a living, changing thing that you must tend to both alone and together It grows in all sorts of ways, both ordinary and unexpected.

when a woman is content in her marriage, her husband is much happier; a man's level of satisfaction within the marriage, however, appears to have no bearing on his wife's happiness.

Whenever I feel old—which seems to be happening more and more often these days—Alice tells me to imagine taking a picture of myself, then to imagine myself twenty years in the future looking at that picture, thinking how young I looked, hoping that I had enjoyed or at least recognized my youth. That usually does the trick

I already have a son One is enough? There was a time when I dreamt of having three or four but I rather failed one the fatherhood front didn't I? Some errors don't bear repeating.

Technical speaking one is a beautiful number. One is its own factorial, its own square, its own cube. It is neither a prime number nor a composite number. It is the first two numbers of the Fibonacci sequence. It is the empty product. Any number raised to the zero power is one. It might be argued that one is the most independent number known to man. It can do things no other number is capable of.

But there's no emergency kit for marriage. No neat plan you can turn to when the ground shifts beneath your feet.

I guess I'm just stuck on the idea that there's this monumental machine, and we're all part of it. Most of the time, we don't even stop to think about how it works. We just go about our business, doing our part, trusting that everyone else will do their part, and the machine will keep functioning. But all it takes is for someone to come along who isn't thinking straight, some who's not paying attention, or worse, hell-bent on self-destruction and everything turns to shit.

I might having something else for you. Follow me.

Maybe there was symmetry everywhere, and the patterns of our days held no less certainty than the mathematical patterns of the universe. Maybe, in order to see the patterns, one simply needed to take a few steps back, turn the page upside down, approach everything from a different angle.