Quotes from Deb Caletti

Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It's the silence, sure, but it's also the certainty of all those books, the way they stand side by side with their still, calm conviction. It's the reassurance of knowledge in the face of confusion.

I confess I had a Child of Divorce Reunion Fantasy Number One Thousand, where I for a moment imagined my father finding out that Dino really was a killer woman and that my parents would have to get back together. I saw them running through a meadow, hand in hand. Okay, maybe not a meadow. But I saw me having only one Christmas and one phone number and only my father's shaved bristles in the bathroom sink.

An untold story has a weight that can submerge you, sure as a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean. I learned that. This kind of story, this kind of things kept secrets -they have the power to keep your head in forever, and most of all for yourself.

Don't you wish you could live inside a book sometimes?" "All the time.

The truest thing about truth was that it needed to be seen no matter what it was and no matter how it came to you.

Our memories and events in our lives are untidy things. We wish that we can file them away and shut the door, or wish the opposite - that they would stay forever.

we learned about power and powerlessness from our mothers and fathers first, right? And they learned from their mothers and fathers, and so on and so on? Fix that shit.

but truthfully, a kiss needs something more important than curiosity. A kiss needs desire. A kiss should rocket past the excitement level of eating lettuce.

What should never be forgotten is this: Even when times are dark, the darkest, even when you are sure that life as you know it is over, there are still things that last.

Against the sky, she is exquisitely elsewhere.

Who's crazier, anyway: people who struggle honestly, or the people who act like they never do?

Endings and beginnings sit so close to each other that it's sometimes impossible to tell which is which.

It's amazing, the communal sharing. But the sexist religious stuff . . . Not a fan, Annabelle, not a fan. Male managed. The women walk behind the men. 'Working for each other is the highest command of love.' Working for each other, or for him, Mr. King Big Man walking ahead? Equality and respect are the highest command of love.

It's some twisted, limited, grocery-store mentality, where people have to be dairy products or vegetables or frozen foods for us to be able to understand them and feel safe. Maybe we've just become such mega-consumers that we can't deal with anything that's slightly inconvenient (basically, anything that requires thought). I was the tofu amidst the Baking Products and Cleaning Supplies.

Exactly. I'm almost done. Last pages." "I shouldn't interrupt, then." "Hey! You know rule number one. You must be a reader." "I thought rule number one is 'Don't tell the ending.' " "Wait. Rule number one: Hate the movie version." "Probably, all our rules are rule number one. We can get a little hard-core." "Always judge a person by their shelves. To fold or not to fold the pages.

It makes me nervous, the way the biggest things and the smallest live together day in and day out.

It was the feeling of not belonging, and longing for your familiar couch and your familiar TV with all those comforting TV people who couldn't see you.

I love to see those paragliders weaving softly around Moon Point, their legs floating above you in the air. When they drift in for a landing, their feet touch the ground and they trot forward from the continued motion of the glider, which billows down like a setting sun. I never get tired of watching them and I've seen them thousands of times. I always wondered what that kind of freedom would feel like.

I'm fine." Oh, how we love and overuse fine, our all-purpose little evasion. Fine means not fine. Fine means Pity me. Fine means Don't ask.

Love was such a delicate thing, requiring tissue-paper touch and the safest place, yet there it was out in the real world, where it got battered by storms of ill will and bad circumstances and demons of your own or of other people. Love didn't stand a chance.

Apologies were harder for the person getting one than the person giving one.

We put God in front of terrifying things, and we knocked three times, and we took drugs and shopped too much and obsessed about success, so that the scary stuff would look farther away than it was. We worried, because maybe if we worried enough, it would act like a spell of safety. All those things, superstitions and addictions and anxiety, they were all about hiding from what scared the shit out of us.

It's both harder and easier without words.

He's all right. He's fine," Dad says, his usual line whenever Oliver gets hurt. It means: Go away. Don't baby him. Don't show too much compassion. The other dads do this too. It's some kind of group hysteria, based on some fatherly fear that says compassion equals homosexuality.