Quotes from Lisa Unger

I started thinking about how to draw her, how I'd capture all the things I saw in just those few moments that our lives intersected. Faces are so hard because they are more than lines and shadows. They are about light, but a light that comes from inside and shines out.

As parents, we must accept that our children are who they are. We can't make them into something we want, or be disappointed in them because they don't meet our artificial expectations.

It's never one thing that leads to a tragic accident, she was sure she'd read once—though she couldn't say where. It's usually seven things—seven mistakes, or errors in judgment, or acts of negligence. If you reverse engineer any major disaster—oil spill or train derailment or airplane crash—there are usually seven things that had to go wrong in order for them to occur. Claudia

You were never so acutely aware of your own flaws as you were in the presence of your child. Why was that?

Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can break your heart.

IF YOU REALLY let life take you, if you release control and stop clinging to sameness, you can't imagine the places you'll end up. But most people don't do that. Most people get this death grip on what they know, and the only thing that loosens their grasp is some kind of tragedy.

There was something eternal about loss, something endless. You could always lose the things you had, but you couldn't always get back the things you lost.

We hate our parents for having their own lives, don't we, for making decisions for themselves that don't seem to take us into account. They're not people, not really. They're parents; how dare they live and love and die without us?

Why did people think that was okay, to kill something and stick its head on your wall?

Kindness, I think, comes from learning hard lessons well, from falling and picking yourself up. It comes from surviving failure and loss. It implies an understanding of the human condition, forgives its many flaws and quirks.

Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster." —Friedrich Nietzsche

Never forget those first five minutes, when you thought how much you loved each other was the only thing that mattered. Because in truth it is the only thing that matters. That love is what gets you through all the other stuff.

There was no undoing the bad without losing the good. That was the trick of it all.

It's all these choices that we could have made, the things we might have done. We see them with perfect clarity only long after the moment has passed. Just thirty seconds either way, and I wouldn't have this story to tell you. I wouldn't be the same person telling it.

Maybe that alone was the foundation of a good marriage, an endless willingness to forgive and to love in spite of ourselves, an ability to ride the highs and endure the lows, the decision to always go home. She

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?

I feel that familiar niggle of not wanting to disappoint anyone, ever, for any reason. Another female quirk, isn't it? Always be polite, meet expectations, smile when you don't want to, cry instead of getting angry. Be pleasing.

Sometimes silence is the only answer we get, and we have to accept that.

When someone we love dies suddenly and tragically, it's like seeing the curvature of the earth. You always knew it was round, a contained sphere floating in space. But when you see the bend in the horizon line, it changes your perspective on everything else.

I didn't understand depression, how it was a con and a thief of joy. How it lured people away, making them believe that the world was better off without them.

Birdie wondered why that so often seemed to be the case—once you had what you wanted, it was a shadow of what you'd dreamed it to be.

there was only one rule. Work hard and be nice, and everything would go just fine. That should be the rule for life, too, Emily thought. But, of course, that wasn't how things went.

Fear holds on. Love lets go.

Didn't it seem like really thin, gorgeous people were always so mean? Where did they get that aura of entitlement? And didn't it seem like people always fawned over them even though they behaved badly? Why was that?