Quotes from Lisa Unger

solastalgia, a miserable tangle of solace, desolation, and nostalgia.

We don't always choose what happens to us. But we choose what we do with it.

I love the way Beck loves. If everyone loved like she did, the world would be a better place.

People who kill themselves generally suffer from severe clinical depression," I said. "Their reasons for choosing suicide are not always rational. It's often a chemical imbalance that leads them to the choice.

Glenn Albrecht defines it as the distress of seeing a familiar environment bitterly transformed by drought, fire, flood, war. But it describes perfectly

That night. It was buried so deep. A blessed amnesia can set in after trauma. You move away from the event and it takes on dreamlike qualities. It recedes from the day-to-day. But it's not gone, just submerged. When it surfaces, it brings up powerful emotions. Rage. Terror. Sadness like a well with no bottom.

Anything you fight against gets stronger.

Is there anyone dearer than the children of people you love, especially when you don't have your own?

We're all crazy in our own special way. Some of us just have it wore than others.

We may say we're looking for love, following dreams, chasing the dollar, but aren't we just looking for a place where we belong? A place where our thoughts, feelings, and fears are understood?

Thank goodness for grandparents. Paul never seems to get tired

Some things don't leave us. We just learn to live with them better.

Dreams come true, I guess, just not always how you imagine them.

The world is in chaos. It's not about that. The world has always been on fire. Now, it might not be about saving it, as much as it is about helping each other through it all. Holding each other up, helping, fixing, working together, loving, forgiving. You don't get to just leave, just make a space and hide there waiting for everything dark and frightening to go away.

You know Travis, Maggie," Leila said. "He's toxic. Like, you can't touch him—it burns. And Marshall. He's just different when his father's around. I hate to say it. I'm afraid of him. Of both of them. My own brother and nephew.

need to protect my boys from their … poison.

counseling. She said that grief is not linear. It's not a slow progression forward toward healing, it's a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones.

I think my family has done everything we can for Marshall," said Leila

He's almost an adult. We have to save ourselves sometimes, Maggie. You should know that.

Story is life, Miss Graves," he said. She'd heard him say that a million times. She finally understood what he meant.

Think of him as an addict, said her new therapist in one of Selena's individual sessions. This doctor had fewer excuses for Graham. His behavior is something outside of you that you don't control and can't fix. Don't hang your worthiness on his failings. But now you have to decide where your boundaries are, what you will and will not tolerate. Every marriage is a negotiation. Both parties have to obey the terms.

This was what happened. Abused boys became dangerous men. Those around them with a self-preservation instinct—even the people who loved them—started to move away.

When life is reduced to the survival of someone you love, everything else reveals itself as trivial.

Maybe it was hereditary, anger. Maybe it lay dormant in boyhood, the disease taking hold in late adolescence. Then it either burned out before any damage was done, or took control.