Quotes from Laurie Frankel

She was always threatening to move to be nearer to Rosie and the boys, but Wisconsin was- obviously, nonnegotiably, self-evidently-too cold. So she stayed in Pheonix and held the weather to her heart as a talisman, clutched to her breast against all counteroffers. But she came up for the summers. Pheonix's weather need not be clutched to the breast for June through September.

mirrors, and scraps of scribbled

what his father had been up to all these years, not entertaining his children but perfecting his world. If you wrote your own characters, they didn't disappoint you like real people did. If you told your own story, you got to pick your ending. Just being yourself never worked, but if you made yourself up, you got to be exactly who you knew yourself to be.

Having children, helping people, making art, inventing anything, leading the way, tackling the world's problems, overcoming your own. I don't know. Not much of what I value in our lives is easy. But there's not much of it I'd trade for easy either, I don't think.

Do you realize, Rosie said to her mother, that I'm the one who's suppose to be calming you down about all of this. Not the other way around? I'm the one who's suppose to be talking you off the ledge. You're suppose to be panicking and dragging him off to church or something. So few Jews at church these days, said Carmelo. You're to old to be open-minded and tolerant, said Rosie. I'm too old not to be. She sucked coolly on her cigarette again, then waved at Rosie to punctuate her point.

She was in a book club?" said Poppy. "Everyone's in a book club." "Like with wine?" Poppy was intrigued. "It's not a book club if there isn't wine.

Easy is nice, but I wonder how often it leads to fulfilling work or partnership or being.

Orion's butt used to be a tuba," said Rigel, "and that's why it makes those noises.

It was as if those school years bred a nostalgia so deep into the cells that the body woke to it each fall as naturally as the squirrels in the park began their frenzied harvest, never mind the weather was still fine, the sun still gracing them all.

Rosie was horrified that Claude felt so precarious outside of it. But Rosie was also used to conflicting emotions, for she was a mother and knew every moment of every day that no one out in the world could ever love or value or nurture her children as well as she could and yet that it was necessary nonetheless to send them out into that world anyway.

This was loss that ruined your life leading straight to gain that saved it. It wasn't silver lining; it was a whole silver sky.

Boys and girls, you asked good questions, and you asked them nicely and quietly, so I'm putting a cookie token in our cookie jar to help us earn our cookie party.

After that she'd have to go elsewhere anyway for breadth of experience. A different part of the world where she would develop expertise in more than frostbite, and lost toes, and idiots frozen to their fishing poles. But Rue, followed by Ben, followed by Rigel and Orion, had put a stop to that plan too; children being the enemies of plans and anything new besides themselves.

One is the loneliest number. Never put all your eggs in one basket.

It was a crime of passion. "Mine to", Ben nodded, also miserably. And which was worse, Penn thought. Out of hatred or love?

All life. You are never finish, never done. Never become, always becoming. You know? Life is change so is always okay you are not there yet.

It's not that Poppy's the girl and Claude's the boy. There's boy and girl in both of them. They both have what they parade and what they hide. It's that Poppy's the happy child, and Claude is the sad one

They don't say what they mean." "No one says what they mean." "No one says what they mean all the time. Most people say what they mean sometimes. Usually." "Teenagers done know what they mean.

It wasn't so much that she and Penn set out to practice Zen marriage equality and perfect-balance parenting. It was just that there was way more to do than two could manage, but by their both filling every spare moment, some of what needed to got done.

Hormones contribute to intelligence and creativity, critical thinking, abstract analysis.

Knowing what the problem was didn't help if none of the solutions were available in any case.

Later, much later, she said the same, that it was love pre first site, that she'd walked around that whole morning and afternoon somehow knowing that this would be the last first date of her life.

Parent time is like fairy time but real. It is magic without pixie dust and spells. It defies physics without bending the laws of time and space.

Having children, helping people, making art, inventing anything, leading the way, tackling the world's problems, overcoming your own. I don't know.