Quotes About Support

But Coach and I were twelve-step brothers, there's a code. I'd showed up.

Something like that is as bad or as good as a telephone ringing in the night: either way, you're not as alone as you think.

every step you take, as regards the druggie mother?

Willa regretted every failure while she held her daughter and stroked her hair and marveled that mothers' and daughters' hearts can be crushed so repeatedly without learning to defend themselves. She thought of times she'd fallen apart in her own mother's arms, and let herself be put back together.

I remembered my pep talk to Esperanza a few months before, and understood just how ridiculous it was. There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, There now, hang on, you'll get over it. Sadness is more or less like a head cold—with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

The need to shelter her family never lifted its weight from her shoulders, but in practical terms she was useful to no one there but the dog and the baby.

The thing about Angus. We both had our crap to live with, and her way was to give no shit whether you liked how she was doing it, or not. But if I wanted to be a different type person and try for popular, she wasn't going to stand in my way. She was going to help. Not very usual.

I told Dr. Andresen I was going for it, and she did the rare thing of smiling with her whole mouth. I think you are unlikely to obliterate, she said. And I said, You watch. (a conversation with his therapist)

my old Aunt Tess. She was a mother to me if I needed one. What Aunt Tess loved to say was: "Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up your pace." And that was more or less what we all believed in.

This is why we have families.... So we never have to go a single day without worrying ourselves sick.

Maybe it's true what they say, that as long as you're nursing your own pain, whatever it is, you'll turn your back on others in the same boat. You'll want to believe the fix they're in is their own damn fault.

One other person can go a long way towards making your world right, she said, but the support has to run both ways. ... Saying love has to come from a strong place, not just grabbing whatever's in reach. You can't choose your family, but partner is your best shot at a decent do-over. 432

In their universe, nobody shuts you down for being different and wanting the moon. In ours, you live on a tether: to family, parents if you're lucky, older people raising you if less so, that you yourself will end up looking after by and by.

You had to be careful with large families.

because anything to do with improving the life of a child is on the bottom.

The better part of friendship might be holding one's tongue over the prospect of self-made wreckage.

It divided me from the people I knew, then and later, but in broader human terms I don't pretend that it sets me apart in any great way. A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, and so people imagine that a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had

Maggot took credit for that deed so I wouldn't get sent home and skinned alive. Mrs. Peggot pretended to take his word for it, even though she heard the whole thing. Probably everybody has had some golden patch of life like that, where everything was going to be okay thanks to the people that had your back, and sadly you wasted it, by being ticked off over some ignorant thing like a busted TV.

as long as you're living with an addict, you're addicted.

how ridiculous it was. There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, There now, hang on, you'll get over it. Sadness is more or less like a head cold—with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

One other person can go a long way towards making your world right," she said, "but the support has to run both ways.

people's complaints about their siblings only as a primal form of bragging. They had a tribe. They belonged.

A wife had greater wants, naturally, and could do nothing to help her own situation.

Don't send me anything! You just come over and put your arm around me. That's all you do. When you haven't got anythin' else to do, let's take a walk. Let's walk around the backyard. And let me tell you how much you mean to all of us and how we can carry on if you give us a little strength.