Quotes from Lisa Unger

I did, in fact, believe life was fair. Well, not fair exactly, but balanced. Yin and yang. Good and evil. Right and wrong. Bitter and sweet. One did not exist without the other. When life is bad, you know it's going to get better. When life is good, you know it's going to go bad. If that's not fair, I don't know what is.

there were only two ways of being in the world. You either walked through life acting out of love, or you acted out of fear.

When your heroes reveal themselves as human, it exposes your own flaws, too. Naivete, mainly, a willingness to believe in someone, something.

There are so few silent spaces in this modern world; I have learned to relish the gift of insomnia.

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If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it.

Nothing you buy will make you feel as good as money in the bank.

Here the streets were rivers in just hours, one lightning strike could cause a raging forest fire. Nature was always waiting to take itself back by any means necessary. There was something he liked about that, the violence of it, the truth.

But the people who linger on the edge, looking down, the people who pick up the phone and reach out for help? Most of the time, you can talk them down. They are looking for a way back to the light.

I know she was in love with a ghost. She was haunted, waiting for that man to come home to her and rescue her from the one he had become.

We give because we love, not because we fear. When we give with love, we can disconnect from how things are received. Only the act of pure giving is important.

Not that she didn't about fighting losing battles.

It was depraved, wasn't it? Like those people who listened to endless crime podcasts, sifting through the details of cold cases, all the different ways people can torture and kill each other.

How can you desire someone who hurts you? How can you miss him so much your body aches? Maybe not him, the man he actually was, but the man I thought he was. We cling to our ideas of people, don't we? We hold on tight even when all evidence points to something else.

am the puzzle piece that you think will fit but doesn't. The color is a little off, the edges don't sit quite flush. You can't force it. Though you might try.

We cling to our ideas of people, don't we? We hold on tight even when all evidence points to something else.

Cricket felt that her spiritual home might be Neiman Marcus. She was far from the kind of place that made her feel comfortable—someplace gleaming and clean with lovely, expensive goods for sale. People were so into "nature," weren't they? Getting into it, back to it. Why? Nature just seemed spooky and unsafe to Cricket. There was that whole no-one-can-hear-you-screaming vibe. They hadn't seen another car for ages. Ages.

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

She wondered if he was about to deliver another lecture about remembering death. As if a mother ever had to be reminded of that. Maybe it was just men who needed to acknowledge how fragile, how temporary, how unsafe life was.

She watched. That was her gift. To disappear into the black, sink into the shadows behind and between. That's where you really saw things for what they were, when people revealed their true natures, Everyone was on broadcast these days, thrusting out versions of themselves, cropped and filtered for public consumption. Everyone putting on the show of me. It was when people were alone, unobserved, that the mask came off

For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who don't, none will suffice.

And I'd figured out that no one cared, not really. No one gave a shit about anything but himself. People were addled by their own chatter, their own personal litany of fears and insecurities, self-loathing, and selfish desires. Hardly anyone could hear over that. I was invisible if I wanted to be.

seemed like that was all it was, motherhood—grief and guilt and fear. You said good-bye a little every day—from the minute they left your body until they left your home. But no, that wasn't all. There was that love, that wrenching, impossible love.

The rich and vivid imagining that served her so well on the page was torture in her real life sometimes, if she let her thoughts sweep her away.