Quotes from Deb Caletti

It's a simple truth that a secret is something you're ashamed of.

The favorite game of temperamental people is Try to Guess Why I'm Ticked Off. (Contestant number one, Why do YOU think he's pissed off? Why, I'm not sure, Bob, but I'm going to go with 'Because I Left the Faucet Dripping.' BEEP. I'm sorry, that's incorrect. The correct answer is: 'Because You Happen to Exist.')

In the middle of the night I am awakened by a sound. I sit up abruptly in bed. I hear it again. It's music. Wait, it sounds like the ice cream man, in our house. Is this some kind of twisted nightmare? The flipping ice cream man, breaking in to chop us all up in our beds to the tune of 'Zippity Do Dah'?... My heart slows. I remember. There is no psycho ice cream man here. It is just our new musical soap dispenser...

Flawed Human Parents + Shit Life Throws At You = Childhood That 'Builds Character.

I may be nervous," I say. "Okay, I'm really glad you said that, because I just went to the back room to put on more deodorant." Sebastian says.

Music and books stir up emotions. They make feelings rise and clatter and wreck, and sometimes that's dangerous. But music can make you rise up and clatter and destroy when you need to, too.

A drop of poison on that gathering snow. That moment in the fairy tale when we know what just happened but the princess doesn't.

Anxiety is like being in freeway traffic all the time. There's the constant sense of dodging and darting, seeking your chance to cut in, the irritation of others pulling ahead of you. You hit the accelerator, you slam the brakes. You scout and scan for danger.

I tended to give a book a chance and another chance and another, sometimes seeing it all the way to the end, still hoping for for it turn out different. Maybe I was confused about what you owed a book. What you owed people, for that matter, real or fictional.

Maybe some people just had trouble with forever.

Once, I had to drive Oliver to soccer, was ten minutes late, and learned that there had apparently been a misprint in the Bible on the Ten Commandments thing: Thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not be late to soccer. My father was so pissed, I practically had to get the lightning bolt surgically removed from my back.

I felt a constant, low-flying desperation, the kind you feel when you are trying, trying, trying to get something you will never, ever get.

Grief is everywhere. It's its own being. It walks beside you silently, jumps out at you meanly, pokes you awake at night. It makes tears roll down your cheeks at a blue sky.

I wondered if parents had an easier time with the secrets their children kept than children did with the secrets of their parents. A parent's secrets seemed like some sort of betrayal, where my own just seemed like a fact of life and growing up and away. I was supposed to be independent, but he was supposed to be available. Him having his own life seemed selfish, where me having my own was the right order of things.

What is uneasy when you are awake in the daylight is terror in the dark honesty of your dreams.

Control was just wishful thinking, and you controlled things to hedge your bets, to be safe, to guard against loss.

So if your life truths have to be protected the same way some people keep their couches in plastic, then ciao. Have a nice life. If we bump into each other at Target, I'm the one buying the sour gummy worms, and that's all you need to know about me.

Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them.

I don't know why we do it. But sometimes we just swim straight for the net.

Most people, it seems like they've only got one part of the equation down. Caring for themselves, or caring for someone else. And I'v learned how important it is to have both.

so what brings you to the doctor today?" "hmm, im afraid i have the chronic desire to save people" "i know about that. i've got it too. maybe it's catching." "not catching enough

She once led this secret uprising to switch the voice boxes of Barbies and G.I. Joes. When they hit the shelves, G.I. Joe said, 'Let's go shopping!' and Barbie said, 'The enemy must be overtaken.' I laugh. "No way." "Yes way. Sex-role stereotyping in children's toys, all that.

We are thickly layered, page lying upon page, behind simple covers. And love - it is not the book itself, but the binding.

A relationship could be a place to hide too.