Quotes from Deb Caletti

In a world of insanity, nothing is sacred. It's an insane world, nothing is sacred.

Life and our love for others is a balancing act, I understand then; a dance between our instinct to be safe and hold fast, and our drive to flee, to run - from danger, toward new places to feed ourselves.

One thing you can say about daughters and mothers—like it or not, they know the truth about each other.

He's not coming back. Maybe I do know this after all. Goodbye. I say to him in my head. I say it tenderly. I try to tell him with that one word how sorry I am.

Dad was a writer down to his cells, and he loved metaphors. Everything was a metaphor. Your dirty laundry could be one. Unexpected encounters with dog shit, definitely.

the sometimes brave but searching girl….

We try to hold a storm in our own fist but we are not that strong.

Real tough guys don't swear, they just do.

Turned up or turned down, the feeling is permanent. She survived something big, and when you survive something big, you are always, always aware that next time you might not.

You never know what a day will bring, which is both the good news and band news of life.

Love doesn't seem to follow a plan; it's not a series of steps. It can hit with the force of nature - an earthquake, a tidal wave, a storm of wild, relentless energy that is beyond your simple attempts at control.

You never know what a day will bring, which is both the good news and the bad news of life.

True love, even if just in your head, can make you forget how badly things actually suck.

I guess after all those years he had exhausted me. I never knew I was signing up for a battle, but I finally knew that he had won.

Something has happened to her and about her, and yet it is hard to grasp this fact. Her run is larger than her, and yet her daily life is mostly just her solitary steps, the rhythm of them, her daily aches, her loneliness, and the flashes of the nightmares that she experiences daily. It seems that she's become a person with a message, but she's unclear what the message is. Maybe because the message is still fighting its way through the grief and guilt to get to her.

Fragile things become undone at a frightening speed.

The night smelled like blackberry leaves and the ocean's nearness, something sweet and deep and full.

I've always felt that a heart is meant to be given to only one person at a time. And, too, when it moves on, it moves on for good.

You've got an in-love feeling, but the relationship is damaging. When do you stop calling it love?

I'm staying out of this. It's the whole culture of all-consuming nowness I try to avoid. Ever present and screaming its message in the halls, on television, on everyone's personal web pages. Do me, I'm yours. I'm part of the counterculture who actually thinks about the future. Subversive activities are always best kept a secret so I keep my mouth shut.

Nature is never static, I understand. Change is ever-constant, clouds zipping across a sky. It is dynamic, complicated, tangled, mostly beautiful. A moving forward, something newly gained, means that something is lost, too.

Here is what happens when your mother worries: You become secretly worried. Anxiety plays in your background like bad grocery store music. You pace and count stuff and wake at night, your heart beating too fast. You pretend to be brave, and do stuff to prove you're not a scared person like she is.

What came next wasn't exactly silence, because although it was quiet, a thousand things were being said. I hated that part about an unhappy household--that feeling of being perched and listening, the way an animal must feel at night in the dark, assessing danger.

Dread begins to inch in. No. Dread isn't one of those subtle emotions. It moves in and takes over, and then it drips and hands, like Spanish moss.