Quotes from Allison Winn Scotch

But I suppose our childhoods are seeds inside of us that plant roots forever, even when we're certain their life cycles have long since been extinguished. How long will it take for my own roots to loosen their grip?

regret is just misplaced nostalgia. That you can look back fondly or even wistfully on pieces of your life and hound yourself with endless what-ifs, but nothing will change. The present will still be the present. The future will still unfold as it's meant to.

When I got to college, when I finally fled the suffocation that I'd built around myself—because, to my father's credit, he'd never asked me to captain our plagued family's ship—it all collapsed.

The sun will sink lower soon enough, turning the fields into open black space, ushering another day out, another day in--one after the next.

Eventually kids become grown-ups too, and from there, the world is whatever they choose to make of it.

If we always take the path of least resistance, if we embrace inertia, if we never leap, if we never accept accountability for our choices, how can we find any triumph in our victories or any remorse in our losses?

After Megan's death, Tyler spiraled downward into an abyss of steely blankness, as if Megan were the only color in his life, and without it, there was only white, black, and gray. He numbed his pain with booze, and slowly, wrenchingly, pulled away from all of us, isolating himself in an angry cocoon, where none of us could reach him and he didn't want to be reached.

figure if a girl wants to be a legend, she should go ahead and be one. —Calamity Jane

You get what you get. You do what you have to do. You stop crying. You stop sleeping. You turn yourself into someone to be reckoned with. You become a straight line, and then you become an arrow.

an average Wednesday in October

They occupied a space in her life, but they didn't take up space, which were two very different things.

Mostly, people are who they are. But if you accept this about them, you can move forward and build from there—then, they can surprise you.

motherhood is like this: a series of tiny moments that add up to an enormous love, with lots of other moments of frustration and misunderstanding and complexity woven in between.

Dearly beloved, We are gathered here today, To get through this thing called life. —Prince, "Let's Go Crazy

There's always more than one path, and to think otherwise is what resigns you to fate.

She's found, after all, that if you force yourself not to think of things, they lose their power; they shift from reality to mirage, from true to almost imaginary. And

I'm better at life with you in it.

The strangest thing about returning to an enclave that encapsulated your youth is that you feel like nothing should have changed. Like you still have the right to be twenty and carefree and irresponsible. Like you still are twenty and carefree and irresponsible.

No one really can have any idea if it's luck or happenstance or timing or fate or the universe or just smart choices that grant you a good life, a happy one. All we can do is decide to own our choices no matter what, to honor them and ourselves as best we can. That whatever is within our control (and there is plenty that is not) is ours. Mine. Responsibility. Conviction.

It gets easier. Eventually you figure out what went wrong and you sort of breathe a sigh of relief that you didn't make a more permanent mistake. And then you just hope that you find someone who won't end up being another misstep.

everything within our control is a choice. I

The point of life wasn't to go back and litigate all those mistakes. The point, Cleo supposed, was to do better.

That thing you do where you don't give people a chance before they've had any chances in the first place.

I knew that none of us are made any promises, none of us are ordained to be here forever, or even for as long as we want to believe. This is what nearly being robbed of time does to you: it leaves you glancing over both shoulders, wondering when it will catch up to you, wondering when its pace will quicken so you can no longer outrun it.