Quotes from Abigail Thomas

I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It's somebody else's turn now.

I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It's somebody else's turn now.

I used to get upset if somebody I didn't like loved a book I loved. That's MY book, I'd think.

Good things happen slowly and bad things happen fast. Those were comforting words, and they comfort me today.

What can come?" my grandson Sam asked, when he was very young, after his mother had warned him not to go into the woods after dark. What can come? This was a brilliant question. Can is scarier than will. What will come limits itself. What can come has no boundaries.

The connection with him is a connection with part of myself, and it has to do with a kind of insatiable curiosity. I mean the part of me that gets connected to the rest of me when I'm connecting to him. The insatiably curious part.

Love Love can accommodate all sorts of misshapen objects: a door held open for a city dog who runs into the woods; fences down; some role you didn't ask for, didn't want. Love allows for betrayal and loss and dread. Love is roomy. Love can change its shape, be known by different names. Love is elastic. And the dog comes back.

I feel only gratitude. We are doing something as necessary to our well-being as food or air or water. We are steeping ourselves, reassuring ourselves, renewing ourselves, three creatures of two species, finding comfort in the simple exchange of body warmth.

Forget career, forget the future, forget existential worries, just get yourselves a couple of dogs, and everything will be all right.

somewhat leaky boat are on the lookout for a human companion. Not me. I have learned to love the inside of my own head. There isn't much I'd rather say than think. Of course for more than thirty years I've had Chuck. We've known each other so long that we don't have to talk, and when we do we don't have to say anything. When he asks me if I'd like to take a trip around the world I can say yes knowing I'll never have to go.

even when there's no interest on either side one's coordination completely disappears in the presence of beauty (Abigail's daughter, Jen)

But we don't get to choose what sticks. How many times I have run my fingers along a picket fence and thought, This! I will remember this moment always! and all that remains is the memory of a desire to hold on to a memory.

The process is a lot like writing. You start with a wisp of memory, or some detail that won't let you be. You write, you cross out. You write again, revise, feel like giving up. What pulls you through? Curiosity.

I used to lie in a lover's arms getting a stiff neck, or needing to scratch my nose, or losing all sensation in my arm, unwilling to move lest the man find out I wasn't comfortable in his embrace...Would Snow White have rested all eight pounds of her head on any part of the prince? I doubt it, and I never did either. Sarah says that is why elderly women have such prominent cords in their necks.

It's easy to find that five or six hours have sped by without my noticing. I am having fun. This is not my world, these are not my fears. Supernatural is great storytelling, and it is not my story.

There are three things that make me want to drink: difficult times, when I want alcohol to either alleviate the pain or allow me to feel it; clear days that make me want to scribble all over the irritating blue sky; and well, waking up in the morning.

Happy, for instance, once meant luck. Not good luck or bad, just luck. Look what we have done to ourselves. We think we can actually pursue happiness.

Yesterday in his hospital room my husband asked urgently, Will you move me twenty-six thousand miles to the left?Yes, I said, not moving from my chair. After a moment he said, Thank you, adding in wonder, I didn't feel a thing.

drip and fling and pour color onto the glass. Then I push the paint around. You have to have some faith. If it looks like nothing, if you think you've destroyed what might have been a good painting, keep at it. If you've scraped all but a few streaks away, chances are those streaks will suggest something else. Don't give up. Don't be afraid of the mess.

I feel like a tent that wants to be a kite, tugging at my stakes.

If you were to look into our apartment in the late morning, or early afternoon, or toward suppertime, you might find us together sleeping. Of course a good rainy day is preferable, but even on sunny summer days, the dogs and I get into bed.

Maybe there are clusters of souls born again and again into the same repertory company, and with each new birth they play different parts in a different play. Or maybe it's the same play. This would account for those moments of Oh! there you are! After all, there are those people we like and dislike, there are those people we love, and then there are those we recognize. These are the unbreakable connections.

other people's condiments are depressing.

After all, there are those people we like and dislike, there are those people we love, and then there are those we recognize. These are the unbreakable connections.