Quotes from Gina Frangello

I didn't want who I was now to be the most I'd ever be.

Maybe that, then, is the definition of freedom: to be neither protected by nor tethered to a man who can fix anything.

I am proud because I understand that there are times when self-preservation is more important than sentiment, especially when one is a mother, and I could not afford to be perpetually devoured from the inside out, surrendering my hours and days and weeks and months to this turbulent anxiety

This, I came to understand, was what freedom tasted like. It wasn't a heady illusion in the safety of a time-shared bed, seeking the approval of the person whose heart you are breaking. It is being willing to have your own heart broken and not blaming the outcome on anyone. It is being an orphan, and love not being an obligation or prescription, but always a risky, transformative choice.

And yet. It is not easy, living in the shadow of someone's Tragic Illness, so that everything you do seems insubstantial by comparison. Other people in the world would have to agree that this is true.

I miss her more with every passing day because, just as words once written can never be unwritten, grief is not a thing that ends. Sometimes, though, it cracks us open and exposes the places we've hidden, and that can be a kind of gift.

Here in London, however, without the manacle of her tragedies, divorced even from her name, her identity feels so light it might simply float away.

you no longer expect to stop pretending someday. It has become simply a part of who you are,

We can never know what to want, because living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come . . . There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. —Milan Kundera

We are always permeable, shifting. We are all only one strange leap away from becoming inconceivable to our former selves.

sometimes holding on to anger is important to people and is what keeps them going.

I dare try on the idea that maybe, just maybe, my children will love me through my imperfections just as I have loved my father through his—that I don't need to be perfect or even better to be worthy of our bond.

Where you are standing—your spot on the ground amid this vast world—and what you choose to look at from there means absolutely everything.