Quotes from Gina Frangello

Sometimes love just isn't enough to make something possible,

We are all specks of dust against the specter of Time. Is ninety years so different from forty in the scheme of things? We are all the walking dead of history.

I was a mother, whereas he would have been a father, and whether those two labels SHOULD mean the same thing - to the culture, to the parent in question, to the children themselves - in practice they usually do not.

Even the best cellmate on earth cannot change the fact that you are in prison.

He is that sort of person—the kind who appears to have no boundaries at first, who you have to get to know incredibly well to understand that his guileless openness is in part a defense to protect the deeper, more closely guarded things about which he is almost pathologically private.

Death is the only true ending. Everything else falls, to varying degrees, along a continuum of choice.

When you hate yourself enough, there is a sharp tinge of satisfaction in unhappiness.

Persevering is what wives do. Staying is what mothers do. Tending is what daughters do.

Despite humanity's grisly history of war, famine, disease, corruption—despite the fact that not just death but pain and suffering and debilitation are fundamental parts of the human experience—our musicians, our filmmakers, our poets, and even our laws remain profoundly preoccupied with questions of love. Love is not a thing to be trifled with.

When you ask a female colleague whether you expect too much out of marriage if you still want to actually desire your husband, she laughs almost manically and says, "Hell, yes.

So many things, when you break them down, are about perception. So many things hinge on how we choose to interpret both our own choices and the immovable forces beyond our control. So much rests on having the wisdom, and sometimes the cold-edged fucking ruthlessness, to know the difference.

The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free. —Margaret Atwood

The greatest lesson we teach our children is how to survive us.

When you are keeping a secret from someone, and that person dies, the secret becomes impossible to dislodge from inside you.

We are all in the end those rhesus monkeys who cling to the soft plush mother for comfort, ignoring the food on the wire monkey until we starve. Other people can hurt us more than our bodies can.

When somebody dies thinking you are someone you haven't been in years—someone you maybe never were to begin with—what parts of your identity, real and constructed, do the dead take with them?

When we stop drawing a line between moral failings and evil, between the very things that make us human and those that take away our humanity—when we lose sight of mercy and mistake it for weakness, all is lost.

identity is as impossible to pin down and hold as an ocean.

Fear makes people lawless. If indifference is hate's opposite, then compassion is fear's.

The ways in which women both love and support one another, and mistrust and betray and undermine one another, may be the most complex thing in the universe.

What is the line between the living female body and the dysfunctional portrait that has been drawn of it in literature and psychology and medicine?

freedom is only ever a fall without a net.

There is so much more to my father's life and death than how it impacted, reflected on, or revealed me.

There are too few words for who and what human beings are to each other. Language is a territory still mostly uncharted. We are the cartographers, every day, still mapping the human heart.