Quotes from Lisa Unger

I liked how she never offered any physical comfort. I appreciate people who have a healthy respect for personal boundaries. Our culture is too touchy-feely; everyone wants a hug these days. But Dr. Cooper just sat and was present.

Ignorance and fear were responsible for so much horror in the world. All the most heinous acts throughout history could be linked to those demons.

I think we draw people into our lives...It's as though we broadcast our deepest needs...For better or worse, we attract our teachers, our allies, and sometimes even our own nightmares.

It was so much simpler to see other people's wrongs and make them pay. It was so much harder to have compassion, to see yourself in others and find forgiveness.

We all make mistakes coming from our place of pain. When we know better, we do better.

Choices turned to consequences, opinions turned to judgments, and admiration turned to envy. Envy curdled everything, like lemon in milk.

But there was something about him—his voice, the way he listened to her when she spoke, his gaze. It was hypnotic. Mako was always on his phone. If he wasn't, he was distracted by his own thoughts. Not that he didn't love her, that they didn't connect often enough. But it was new to feel like someone was hanging on her every word.

heart thumping.

her in a wide circle, heart thumping.

This is your home," her mother said. "Wherever I am, that's where you belong.

The first law states that energy can change form but cannot be created or destroyed." "Okay." "So, we—our bodies, our spirits or whatever—it's pure energy. To me, that means we have always been here, and we always will be, just taking different forms.

A word I read comes to mind: solastalgia, a miserable tangle of solace, desolation, and nostalgia. Glenn Albrecht defines it as the distress of seeing a familiar environment bitterly transformed by drought, fire, flood, war.

We pick our own predators.

Write it, said Beth. When we narrate our experience, we take control of it. And in controlling the story of our past, we can create a better future.

Her throat felt constricted, breath

People act out of love or they act out of fear," she said. "Those are the only two primary motivators.

Arguments are almost never about the thing they're about.

I loved you before I even knew I loved you, he told me once.

No one likes to be confronted with the truth about what they will do when motivated by fear. But its only human to act in our own self-interest. The slop is a slippery one, an abyss below. It gets away from you, that morality you cling to when things are going well. Its when the bottom falls out of your life that you really see who you are.

know, some secret self, maybe it's hiding in here. I read in one of those clutter clearing books that if you have sealed boxes in your life, then there are places within yourself you're afraid to confront.

It's lovely when people accept your gift with gratitude, but you can't control that. You can only control your intention.

No one ever talks about the power and comfort of a true friendship that endures years. The friend who worries about you, is there when you call, brings soup when you're sick, camps out on your couch when you're sad. There aren't many friends like that. If you have one, be grateful. I know I am.

The whole catalogue of humanity was online, feeling entitled to their opinions and to their right to share. It could be brutal.

She told me 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.