Quotes from Suzanne Finnamore

Bushwhacked, I examine my hands. Same hands. Rings still there but no longer valid.

He announces that lately he keeps losing things. Like your wife and child, I want to say, but don´t. At fourty, I´ve learned not to say everything clever, not to score every point.

When you moved, I felt squeezed with a wild infatuation and protectiveness. We are one. Nothing, not even death, can change that.

Take me now, God! I shout to the inky sky. I´m ready. You´re not ready. You´re not even divorced yet, Bunny says. You cannot die married to that man.

I played possum. I did this, as the possum does, out of fear.

I travel back in time, falling back into what I know for certain, the historical data I cling to in order to not go mad, not assume I made a suicidal and well-informed error in marrying this man.

I am not ready to think of him as either insane or evil, to consider in full how I could love and have a child with such a person. I am not ready to think about anything, except ways in which this may still be averted.

How do you know? How best to ensure his nervous breakdown?" I ask. "Keep going," Christian says. "Just go on as if nothing has happened. We all hate that.

I sensed he may have occasionally strayed in some of his past relationships. It was something I felt but ignored, a rent in the fabric of an otherwise splendid garment I thought I could mend. I thought I could live with it—I thought, yes and I admit it, that I would be different. That at the very least, middle age and children would slow him down; however, they seemed to accelerate his pace.

It´s a little song about abandonment, and it goes something like this....

God is great and God is good," Lisa says. "But where are the Apache attack helicopters when you need them?

I´ve blown past Bitter and am already in the heart of Apathy.

All my life, I should not have worried so much about looking foolish; I see that now. Signs matter. And all waves are dangerous, especially the ones you refuse to see coming.

I should have known then it wasn´t nothing , as he called it. But I was eight months pregnant. No sense closing the barn door now, or so I thought. I swallowed the nothing , straightaway after the usual tears and denial.

The whole world seems tilted, my inner ear displaced by a hole where my spouse used to be.

I feel angry but not homocidal; this may be unlooked-for progress.

I feel incendiary, a wildfire. My spirit licks at the gates of a very elaborate, customized, and distracting emotional Hades.

My mind floats like ash. I blame myself most cruelly.

You can hear now. Your inner ear is formed. I shout "I love you" into the bedroom. Then I feel stupid. Then I don't. This is pretty much the story of my life.

Even better liars can put on a convincing smile, but their eyes aren´t smiling.

I want to own this transition, not to simply swallow the shame of it entire. I will push for every little irony.

They ought to do away with divorce settlements. Instead, both parties should flip a coin. The winner gets to stay where he or she is and keep everything. The loser goes to Paraguay. That´s it.

How can I grieve what is still in motion?" I ask her. "Shoes are still dropping all over the place. I´m not kidding," I say. "It´s Normandy out there.

Yes. THANK YOU. And say hello to Judas Iscariot.