Quotes from Lisa Unger

I live for the blank page.

I didn't see the point of judging and analyzing a single moment in someone's life.

Everyone always talks about how well mothers know their children. No one ever seems to notice how well children know their mothers.

You [meaning mothers] said good-bye a little every day -- from the minute they left your body until they left your home.

The past is history. The future is a mystery. The present is a gift.

Hope is good. Without it, well, you do the math. But hope has to be like a prayer. Putting it out there to something more powerful than yourself.

I definitely feel that plot flows from character. I don't believe that you can construct a plot and insert people into it.

I don't remember a time when I didn't define myself as a writer.

I loved him so much. It didn't change all the reasons we couldn't be together, but it kept me returning to his body, kept my skin seeking his skin over and over again in the sad dance we did.

I don't think of my characters as people I create, I think of them more as people I have met and whom I'm exploring on the page. I don't actually think of myself as having 'created' any of these people.

People didn't fall in love with other people. They fell in love with how other people made them feel about themselves. And so, it was easy to get someone to love you—if you knew how they wanted to feel.

There have been plenty of chances to close my eyes and go back to the sleep of my life as it was, but I hadn't taken any of them. Do I wish now that I had? It's hard to answer that question, as the wraiths move closer.

We can't hold on to anyone or anything, you know. We lose everything except that which we carry within us.

It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that everything that once seemed solid and immovable might just float away. And that this was a truth of life, not an illusion in the grieving mind of a child. Everything that is hard and heavy in your world is made up of billions of molecules in constant motion offering the illusion of permanence. But it all tends toward breaking down and falling away. Some things just go more quickly, more surprisingly, than others.

But did you know that eyewitness testimony is often totally unreliable? The human memory only records events through the filter of its own frame of reference. We try to fit the information we receive into schemas, units of knowledge that we possess about the world that correspond with frequently encountered situations, individuals, ideas, and situations. In other words, we often see things as we expect to see them, or want to see them, and not always as they are.

Parenthood wasn't about blood or biology, he found; it was about a joyful willingness to give yourself over, to subordinate your own needs for someone else's. When you loved your kids, you'd give up everything to keep them safe and make them happy, and you didn't care about the other things, the ones that went away.

I didn't see the point of judging and analyzing a single moment in someone's life.

When our actions and choices are based on fear and denial ... Well, nothing good can come of that. Ever.

They don't find peace. It's pure bullshit. When something unspeakable happens, or when you do something unspeakable, it changes you. It takes you apart and reassembles you. You are a Frankenstein of circumstance, and the parts never fit back quite right and the life you live is a stolen one. You don't deserve to walk among the living, and you know it.

For what other reason might we cling to objects, old photographs, tarnished jewelry, yellowed letters? They're charms, little pieces of magic. When we touch them, we regain for a second what time has stolen or worn away.

What is the difference between justice and revenge? he asked. ... Revenge seeks chaos, he said. Justice seeks balance. That's the difference.

When we narrate our experience, we take control of it. And in controlling the story of our past, we can create a better future.

Is the prey complicit in its own demise? Are we not seduced in some small way by the beauty, the grace, even the dangerous soul of the predator?

Emily looked into his eyes. They were blank, unreadable. That was the worst kind of person, the scariest—the one who'd learned to keep his feelings out of his eyes. Or who didn't feel anything at all. Emily had known people like that; they were the destroyers. They took things—everything you worked for, all your silly dreams—and smashed them beneath their boots for no reason at all.