Quotes from Deb Caletti

Annabelle is rarely relaxed anymore, not even in her own house. So here, her panic is rising. It's a tsunami of dread and obligation and the knowledge of bathroom use in small places.

They call an abusive relationship a cycle of violence, when really it's a cycle of hope. It's a cycle of misguided optimism. One day that optimism is gone, if you're lucky.

Ass-kissing is the last resort of any anxious person who's in over their head.

Admittedly, guilt can be my default setting. After a social gathering, I'm often left with a vague sense of wrongdoing that I try to pinpoint the source of. Had I laughed insensitively or slighted someone unintentionally? And I always feel accused in Nordstrom. The saleswomen look at my jeans and inexpensive haircut and I'm sure they're thinking I'm about to slip a pair of earrings into my purse. I feel guilty when I eat white bread and when I don't recycle.

Words were hills and valleys you traveled, so lovely sometimes that they hurt your eyes.

Her look was easy to read—she couldn't understand, we'd always been able to talk, she was hurt. Mothers can give all of that to you in one brief look.

Love must be more about power than we think, if even in its most intimate moment of expression we think about not being the one who risks the most.

We can't get so wrapped up in our own misconceptions that we miss the simple beauty of the truth.

Her whole life is devouring her, slow second by slow second.

But something had already been set in motion, and I wonder and wonder how things would have been if I'd just let that moment pass, the one where our eyes met. If I had just taken Shakti's arm and moved off, letting the electrical jolt that passed between us fade off, letting the girl return to his side, letting fate head off in another direction entirely, where he would have kept his eyes fixed on the girl with the purse or on another girl entirely.

Nothing is more intimate than someone who knows your heart. Nothing is more dangerous than someone who knows your heart. Holding someone's heart like that is power.

You wanted more from people sometimes. And sometimes,you wanted more from yourself.

We had a humiliating and lengthy wait at a DONT WALK sign with not a car in sight for miles. Dad was a press about jaywalking. Or maybe he just like to stare down what he'd testily called the "grammatical error sanctioned by the state." There is, of course, no apostrophe in the DONT WALK sign.

We looked at each other and smiled like we just discovered something wonderful, maybe kissing itself, something no one else ever figured out. It seemed like ours, a terrific secret.

Love was also an easy word, used carelessly. Felons and creeps could offer it coated in sugar, and users could dangle it so enticingly that you wouldn't notice it had things attached—heavy things, things like pity and need, that were as weighty as anchors and iron beams and just as impossible to get out from underneath.

That night, after we turned out the light, the red digital numbers of the bedside clock stared me down. I tried to ignore it, but of all household objects, bedside clocks are the most insistent, more than beeping refrigerators and door alarms, more than kitchen timers and even blaring radios. It's the strong silent types that get you.

More, much more, will happen after this. Things involving maps and books and true love and tragedy, tragedy like you wouldn't believe. But fine things too. The best ones.

Good can sit in the distance, just beyond your view, waiting, until you go toward it.

When the story gets sad and terrible, when there are too many mistakes to count, hang on for the beautiful parts.

Maybe she's meant to be alone. Unmarried. Deliciously free of people's expectations. It sort of sounds like heaven, actually.

If this is where we do female bonding, aren't we supposed to put on an Aretha Franklin song?

Fury and devastation are fraternal twins.

I like those very realistic paintings that look like photographs, or novels that are so much like actual life that you feel understood.

Each story, good and bad, short or long--from that trip to the mall when you saw Santa, to a long, bad illness--they are all a line or a paragraph in our own life manuscript. Two thirds of the way through, even, and it all won't necessarily make sense, but at the end there'll be a beautiful whole, where every sentence of every chapter fits.