Quotes from Lisa Unger

When my father died, I waited for a haunting. I prayed for one. But he never came; I think he would have if he could.

What is the difference between fiction and memoir, really? I mean, isn't there a bit of autobiography in every novel? And isn't there a bit of fiction in every memoir? Memory is elastic, and no two people have the same version of any given event. Our versions of our own lives are necessarily fictional to some degree, wouldn't you agree?

But what she hadn't realized was that this imaginary respect she craved was only granted to older men. She hadn't understood that when her body started to weaken and sag, when her beauty faded, she would become invisible.

Remember that one of the best things you can do for your daughter is take care of each other.

You can choose and create the life you want. You are the author of your reality.

Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep. —John Milton, Paradise Lost

Life's not so simple. People are many things, each of them true.

It's about biology, genetics, of course. But most of all, it's about what you do with what you're given.

The reward for all high performance must be sought within itself or sought in vain.

The choices we made ... These were the right choices. They were positive and proactive. And it was, for a time, good for everyone, most especially our boy. But were these choices really? Or were they reactions? Reactions to something that life had thrown at us, something we didn't choose and didn't want. Is there a difference between reaction and choice? I don't know the answer.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

It's strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.

We broadcast one version of ourselves, cropped and filtered and out there for consumption. But the real person is hidden behind that.

My dad and I were in the kitchen, bent over the table while he tried to help me with my trigonometry homework—which, PS, addled my brain and has yet in life to reveal its practical application.

Pull yourself together, Selena, she chided. Fix this. End this. Write a better headline.

What had amazed him, what amazed him still, even after all these years, was how quickly he'd stepped out of himself. He'd slipped off every convention and moral that had defined him, a great cowl that fell to the floor with the unfastening of a single closure. The person beneath it was someone he barely recognized.

wondering why people held on to anger and sadness, gripped it tight, let it dictate the course of their lives, but found it so hard to find and keep love.

Maybe we're all so confused these days about what's real and what isn't, what's authentic, what's fake, that our instincts for the truth have been dulled.

Life is brutal. Naturally, it changes us. Why does that always come as a surprise? The galaxy is in a constant state of change, an explosion, ever moving outward. The planet—shifting, erupting, continents drifting, tsunamis, fires raging. Why do we try to stay the same? We can't.

The more you want from the world, the more it holds you by the throat.

She scrolled through page one, page two, page three—the way her brother had taught her. Sometimes the things you want to know are buried deep—fixers and hiders have gotten very good at burying bad press deep beyond where anyone has the attention span to look.

This is how we define ourselves now, our worth determined by how many people like, follow, engage.

How the hell should I know what we deserve?

He wondered what it would be like to grow up in one place and stay there all your life, to forever be defined by your childhood relationships, to never know if you got to be the person you wanted to be, to always be the person you were when you were young.