Quotes from Lisa Unger

It sounded to him like the noise of too many mouths that talk and too few minds that think.

What we think of as our "gut instincts" are really a very complex mosaic of past experiences, deep-seated hopes, fears, desires.

We had a great friendship, good sex, a shared passion for the dinosaur room at the Museum of Natural History and Haagen-Daz French Vanilla ice cream. But love is more than the sum of its parts, isn't it?

Every couple starts off loving each other, don't they? It's how a relationship ends that really defines its nature.

an awareness of your own worth is the most attractive quality in the world.

I mean—are some men just flawed by nature? Or do we enable their bad behavior, make it worse in a way because we hide it, and don't demand better from them?

I thought about my brother. I hated him. Hated him like a child hates a fallen hero. I hated him for his unlimited potential and his failure to realize it. I hated him because I could see everything that was wonderful about him, how brilliant, how beautiful he was, and how he had turned his back on everything he could have been, cast it off like a designer suit for which he'd paid an obscene sum and never wore.

Shock is the stepsister of denial. It cushions the blow to your psyche when really fucked up things happen.

All women are mysteries." "Only men think that," said Pearl. "Largely because they're not paying attention.

But that's the thing about mental illness; there's no such thing as a cookie-cutter diagnosis. We're all crazy in our own special way. Some of us just have it worse than others.

He'd been raised to give women what they wanted. 'You can fight,' his father told him. 'You can bitch. If you're a real prick, you can overpower. But the pain over the long haul ... just not worth it, son. Surrender young and happily with fewer scars.' The old man was right about that.

But in the end, it's not just the big and small events that make you who you are, make your life what it is, it's how you choose to react to them. That's where you have control over your life.

Maybe that's all life was, this impossibly complicated helix of choice and accident, things you could control and couldn't. And when the day was done, the only measure of success was how happy you were, how much you loved and were loved.

Each of us extracted different people from our parents by our personalities and hence we had different experiences growing up.

Nobody told you that wen you became a parent, you became a child again; it was early bedtimes and grilled cheese sandwiches for all. Every date night was a negotiation, every invitation that you actually had the desire or energy to accept became a strategic maneuver that may or may not work out after all.

Uselessness, she thought, was the permanent condition of parenthood.

You can put on a mask and a costume for the rest of the world, but you can't hide from the people who changed your diapers.

When you're young it's easy to confuse passion for love.

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.

You didn't wind up on a pole without a lot of help from your family.

The woman I was seems hopelessly naive. I envy her.

I should have been sending up flares, instead I was offering smiles.

Houses are like people. They have memories, and energy. They wait. They wilt from neglect. They sicken and decay. They haunt, and they are haunted.

Life is an impossible twist of choice and circumstance. One rarely exists without the other.