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Funny the only two times we use the phrase "seeing someone" are when we are referring to being in a a relationship or getting psychological help. -- Deb Caletti
This was what happened after you'd been together with someone a long time. You loved that it was old and worn and comfy, but sometimes it was old and worn and comfy. -- Deb Caletti
If letting go, if letting people and things work themselves out in the way that they needed to without your help was the most important thing, then it was also the hardest. -- Deb Caletti
I shouldn't have to be a liar to make someone love me. I shouldn't be so afraid of losing someone that I'll do anything to make them stay. -- Deb Caletti
Fear was the biggest bullshitter, he'd said. But sometimes, too, fear told the truth. -- Deb Caletti
I've heard that people stand in bad situations because a relationship like that gets turned up by degrees. It is said that a frog will jump out of a pot of boiling water. Place him in a pot and turn it up a little at a time, and he will stay until he is boiled to death. Us frogs understand this. -- Deb Caletti
Accents are funny in that they have this odd draw for us, yet we forget we have one, too. No one is without an accent, but the one you've got seems like oatmeal to their caviar. -- Deb Caletti
I am beginning to think there are two kinds of people," she said. I waited. "Those who forgive themselves too easily but will not forgive others."
"And?" I asked.
"Those that forgive others too easily but will not forgive themselves. -- Deb Caletti
Ah. Falling in love is such a magical time." "We just met, Damian. I'm not in love." Damian laughs. "I am going to have you clean the stables today, since you are already so full of shit. -- Deb Caletti
I don't know why we do it. But sometimes we just swim straight for the net. -- Deb Caletti
Rejection, though
it could make the loss of someone you weren't even that crazy about feel gut wrenching and world ending. -- Deb Caletti
My father said that love at first sight should send you running, if you know what's good for you. It's your dark pieces having instant recognition with their dark pieces, he says. You're an idiot if you think it means you've met your soul mate. So I was an idiot. -- Deb Caletti
I was a book lover from the beginning. I loved, love, words and images and ideas, the ways a book can make you feel things deeply or help you understand something you never even knew there were words for. -- Deb Caletti
If you think about becoming a writer, that's just really one of the big dreams I had. It's really important to have those dreams and pursue your passions. -- Deb Caletti
Maybe we all just want to feel special, even for a little while, to be fooled for a bit into feeling something besides the truth of our own ordinariness. -- Deb Caletti
I'd always thought telling the truth to other people was hard, but maybe that was a snap compared to telling the truth to yourself. Sometimes we just refused to know what we knew. -- Deb Caletti
He's good, all right," Mom said. "But I guess there's something else. About being sure. Sure about anything. Right comes with right timing. -- Deb Caletti
The way two people can and everything place, find each other in a crowd, and change your life the lives of the people around them forever ... It makes you believe in fate. In fate love some extra authority. Some destined significance. Wow, very powerful. -- Deb Caletti
My subconscious speaks in a foreign language. -- Deb Caletti
What is it about hairdressers? You tell them 'not too short' and some part of their hairdresser brain hears this as 'whack the shit out of it.' If you never say, 'not too short,' everything is fine. You say it, & it's a guarantee you'll come out ready for the military> -- Deb Caletti
I like those very realistic paintings that look like photographs, or novels that are so much like actual life that you feel understood. -- Deb Caletti
Sorry, sorry, sorry. Oh, you can pile on as many as you want, but the guilt is still there, like that pea under all those mattresses. -- Deb Caletti
I learned something about truth - that truth has an urgency. It forces itself up sometimes, disregarding your need not to look, brought to the surface by that part of us that looks out for our own safety and well-being, if only we'd listen. -- Deb Caletti
I liked the idea of bouncy, open-air Jeeps and I liked the outfits with all the pockets, only I didn't really want to live in Africa and be shot by poachers/get malaria/get stabbed to death. -- Deb Caletti
It's funny the ways we try to punish ourselves when we feel we've committed some crime. -- Deb Caletti
Flawed Human Parents + Shit Life Throws At You = Childhood That 'Builds Character. -- Deb Caletti
Truth was funny, because it was an insistent thing, maybe as powerful and insistent as some force of nature, the push of water or wind. You could keep it out only so long, but it had its own will and its own needs, and maybe you could keep it at bay with lies, but not for long, not for always. -- Deb Caletti
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. -- Deb Caletti
It took me years to figure out that upset was upset, and tumultuousness was not the same thing as passion. Love isn't drama. -- Deb Caletti
Hey," I say back. It's a Hey of Almost Forgiveness. "I've got something I want to show you. Will you come somewhere with me?" Oh, all right. As long as it's anywhere. "Okay. -- Deb Caletti
One thing you can say about daughters and mothers - like it or not, they know the truth about each other. -- Deb Caletti
More than anything, I like just being there while he works, doing what he knows to do, in his own place. -- Deb Caletti
The truest thing about truth was that it needed to be seen no matter what it was and no matter how it came to you. -- Deb Caletti
We forget that just because something is honest it is not necessary the truth. -- Deb Caletti
Wanting things for the wrong reasons can turn anyone's life into a marshmallow on a stick over a hot fire: impossibly messy and eventually consumed, one way or another. -- Deb Caletti
It's good to let God pick a man for you. We don't do so well when we pick them ourselves. They end up lipsticks in a drawer, all those wrong colors you thought looked so good in the package. -- Deb Caletti
I've always felt that a heart is meant to be given to only one person at a time. And, too, when it moves on, it moves on for good. -- Deb Caletti
This is not to say I don't feel my own grief, which can hit powerfully at unexpected times. It's just that the telling does not automatically bring on my own upset, as people assume. I deal more with their reaction than they do with mine, and so you have to choose your timing. -- Deb Caletti
When your arms are out wide, you'll capture love and joy and golden moments but other things, too. Mistrust will sneak in on a wave of that joy, and complications will ride the backs of the golden moments, and there will be both love and the risks of love. That's the way it is. That's the design. -- Deb Caletti
It can be exhausting eating a meal cooked by a man. With a woman, it's, Ho hum, pass the beans. A guy, you have to act like he just built the Taj Mahal. -- Deb Caletti
And pity
people who inspire it in you are actually very powerful people. To get someone else to take care of you, to feel sorry for you
that takes a lot of strength, smarts, manipulation. Very powerful people. -- Deb Caletti
In a world of insanity, nothing is sacred. It's an insane world, nothing is sacred. -- Deb Caletti
That's what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you're not so lovable. -- Deb Caletti
It's a beautiful word. If is a key to any locked door. -- Deb Caletti
We can get so wrapped up in our own misconceptions that we miss the simple beauty of the truth. -- Deb Caletti
It makes you realize how basically everything we do comes down to a) mating or b) competing for resources. It's just like Animal Planet, only we've got Cover Girl and Victoria's Secret instead of colored feathers and fancy markings, and the violence occurs at the Nordstrom's Half-Yearly Sale. -- Deb Caletti
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. -- Deb Caletti
When the story gets sad and terrible, when there are too many mistakes to count, hang on for the beautiful parts. Wait for them. Have some faith they'll arrive. This is also precisely the point: the hanging on. The waiting, the faith. -- Deb Caletti
Cool superiority as a mask for overflowing insecurity. -- Deb Caletti
It makes me nervous, the way the biggest things and the smallest live together day in and day out. -- Deb Caletti
But an apology too - you think you're giving something, but you're not. You're really asking for something. You're asking for forgiveness, you're asking for the other injured person to make it okay for you. Apologies were harder work for the person getting one than the person giving one. -- Deb Caletti
I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way. -- Deb Caletti
True love, the good, the beautiful, one-and-only kind, the kind between loving friends and family and partners who are mostly just trying hard to do their best, it managers to overlook some pieces of its story. -- Deb Caletti
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. -- Deb Caletti
I guess after all those years he had exhausted me. I never knew I was signing up for a battle, but I finally knew that he had won. -- Deb Caletti
Too often in my life, love has been defined as "humiliation with occasional roses". -- Deb Caletti
You were supposed to have hope, right? You were supposed to respect its power and hold on. And so I did. I held, and held, and let hope fill me. But as the days went on, it seemed I could be holding for a long, long time. Hope could be the most powerful thing or the most useless -- Deb Caletti
Real tough guys don't swear, they just do. -- Deb Caletti
Quercus: oak tree. The oak takes an extraordinarily long time to produce seeds. While some plants and trees do so within days or weeks, the oak can take up to fifty years to mature enough before it's ready for offspring. The same can be said for certain people who shall remain nameless. -- Deb Caletti
And if you could make a choice, then why not pick happiness? -- Deb Caletti
Because words were hills and valleys you traveled, so lovely sometimes that they hurt your eyes. -- Deb Caletti
To be a writer is to connect and to play and to attempt to see clearly and understand. It astounds me regularly that feeling things deeply and writing them down is basically my job description. -- Deb Caletti
You have ordinary moments and ordinary moments and more ordinary moments, and then, suddenly, there is something monumental right there. You have past and future colliding in the present, your own personal Big Bang, and nothing will ever be the same. -- Deb Caletti
Fate's got a fucking sick sense of humor. Fate is a shape-shifter. It's the kindest and most generous entity imaginable, laying out more goodness than a person deserves, and then it shrinks and curls and forms into something grotesque. You think its one thing, but then its another. -- Deb Caletti
I've wished for things and never really had the chance ... It's time to stop dreaming and do something about it. You've got to know what you want, then ... go. -- Deb Caletti
And conscience - his thinking was so black and white he thought I was going to hell for having premarital sex. It didn't cross his mind that throwing a water glass across the room at me when he'd found out I'd had premarital sex was not exactly heaven-bound behavior. -- Deb Caletti
The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all. -- Deb Caletti
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. -- Deb Caletti
Sometimes you build up these walls, you build and you build and you build up these walls and you think they're so strong, but then someone can come along and tip them over with only his fingers, or the weight of his breath. -- Deb Caletti
I kept trying to talk myself out of my second thoughts when they were trying to help me. My advice? When it comes to relationships, second thoughts should be promoted. -- Deb Caletti
Stories took twists and turns down fairy-tale paths or down very human everyday ones. You think you're at the end of the book, and it's only the end of a chapter. -- Deb Caletti
It's human nature to want to help and soothe and save with your love, but it's also arrogant. -- Deb Caletti
She would bring you some great book because she was a book matchmaker, because she loved books the way other girls loved clothes. -- Deb Caletti
Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write. -- Deb Caletti
Sometimes you've got to make a mess before you clean it up. -- Deb Caletti
Love seems to be something to approach with caution, as if you'd come across a wrapped box in the middle of the street and have no idea what it contains. -- Deb Caletti
We are all a volume on the shelf of the ... library, a story unto ourselves, never possibly described with one word or even very accurately with thousands. -- Deb Caletti
If you don't participate, you're just taking up oxygen. (Bunny)
Life is a banquet. Approach it with hunger. (Chuck) -- Deb Caletti
Bliss is the ocean, a towel on the sand, the sun out, the chance to swim in waves or walk dragging a stick behind you, a good book, a cold drink. -- Deb Caletti
Whipped cream can remind you why it's good to be alive. -- Deb Caletti
Love was such a delicate thing, requiring tissue-paper touch and the safest place, yet there it was out in the real world, where it got battered by storms of ill will and bad circumstances and demons of your own or of other people. Love didn't stand a chance. -- Deb Caletti
I smile. Not just at bad clowns, but at "library science." I like that name. It makes a library sound as vast and mysterious as the universe or the ocean, requiring specific study to be understood. -- Deb Caletti
Elijah's wearing white shorts and a bright green shirt and plaid sneakers. People who dress like they're in a perfume ad shouldn't be trusted, in my opinion. They're disingenuous with floral overtones. -- Deb Caletti
What is this?"
"Plankton, basically," Henry says. "A plant. A bio luminescent plankton called dinoflagellates."
Oh, Henry. He's so romantic. -- Deb Caletti
The most true-love words are not the ones that grasp and hold and bind you, twisting you both up together in some black dance. No, they are ones that leave you free to stand alone on your own solid ground, leave him to do the same, a tender space between you. -- Deb Caletti
You knew me. You KNOW me. I can't imagine my life without you, without someone who knows me that well. -- Deb Caletti
It's shocking the things we call love. -- Deb Caletti
But, dear God, don't listen to me. I'm an old lady in the middle of nowhere without a real toilet. -- Deb Caletti
Anyway, madness and genius. They're the disturbed pals of the human condition. The Bonnie and Clyde, the Thelma and Louise, the baking soda and vinegar. Insanity just walks alongside the brilliant like some creepy, insistent shadow. -- Deb Caletti
I finally learned that it was all right to say something wasn't working for me when it wasn't working. The world doesn't come crashing down when you speak the truth. -- Deb Caletti
No one is ever quite as strong or as weak as you'd think. -- Deb Caletti
Yeah. When you want what's real and you try to find that in high school, you might as well be looking for a mossy rock beside a babbling brook on the corner of Sixth and Pine in downtown Seattle. -- Deb Caletti
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. -- Deb Caletti
I would have spoken, had my heart not been in my throat -- Deb Caletti
Butterflies are trapped first, before they are free. -- Deb Caletti
Breaking up could sit in front of you for a while. It was a ring of fire you had to at last decide to run through. You finally got tired of standing there, looking at it, feeling the heat, tired enough to finally just let go. Getting burned at last seemed better than the waiting to get burned. -- Deb Caletti
Right there - the hope of bacon is a reason to love life. -- Deb Caletti
I didn't walk over and talk to him, though, not then. If I needed the time for a tree branch to become just a tree branch again and the wind to become just the wind, then a boy, most of all, needed some time to be only a boy. -- Deb Caletti
But what I wanted back had never really been there. He was a temporary illusion, a mirage of water after walking in the desert. I had made him up. And he could have killed me. You've got to stop the ride sometimes. Stop it and get off. -- Deb Caletti
An untold story has a weight that can submerge you, sure as a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean. -- Deb Caletti
We don't want you convicted for condiment theft. You go to that prison, you'll meet big-time operators. Maple syrup stealers. -- Deb Caletti
If you look up "charming" in the dictionary, you'll see that it not only has references to strong attraction, but to spells and magic. Then again, what are liars if not great magicians? -- Deb Caletti
I think a setting is hugely important. I look at setting as a character with its own look, sound, history, quirks, goofy temperaments and moods. -- Deb Caletti
What Dino spent most of his time doing was hiring and firing new managers. Since he ditched William Tiero three-plus years ago, he just want through these poor guys like you go through a bag of M&M's when you've got your period. Consume, and on the the next. -- Deb Caletti
You can hold a secret, hold it so far in that it drives nearly every thought and every move you make- your very heartbeat, almost. -- Deb Caletti
Knowing takes its own time. I swear sometimes you've gotta get really, really uncomfortable before it shows up. -- Deb Caletti
Sometimes I've even wished there was a human pause button, where you could choose some point in your life where you could stay always. -- Deb Caletti
You're an asshole alive, you're still an asshole dead. -- Deb Caletti
'The Nature of Jade' is about a girl who works with the elephants at the zoo near her home, and who, through her involvement with them, becomes involved with a boy and his baby. -- Deb Caletti
Then again, could you go through a colonoscopy with someone and not be wedded for life? -- Deb Caletti
And because he was nice in the beginning did not mean he was a good man. -- Deb Caletti
I would eat fruitcake if there'd been a nuclear war and I'd run out of canned goods. -- Deb Caletti
My instinct is on target about Jenny, because she answers the phone with, "Is everything all right?"
"I've been abducted," I say.
"Aliens, I hope," she says. "We can make some money when you sell your story to the media. -- Deb Caletti
Dad was a writer down to his cells, and he loved metaphors. Everything was a metaphor. Your dirty laundry could be one. Unexpected encounters with dog shit, definitely. -- Deb Caletti
I used to know a woman named Anita Hurl," Lizbeth said. "Get it? I need to hurl? -- Deb Caletti
The most basic and somehow forgettable thing is this: Love is not pain. Love is goodness. And real love
it's less shiny than solid and simple. -- Deb Caletti
To an untrained eye, need and love were as easily mistaken for each other as the real master's painting and a forgery. -- Deb Caletti
And once again, that high, domed sky makes me feel a wide vista of emotion, and once again I could weep at an overturned chair or a torn page, or today, Larry's scruffy beard and the ink on his fingers that I can see from here. -- Deb Caletti
Still, past assholes could make a person feel skittish. You had to be careful. It could all suddenly be different than you thought it was. A big possible mistake could be hidden anywhere, ready to blow up everything, same as stepping on a land mine. -- Deb Caletti
the mind is a tyrant -- Deb Caletti
A person could leave you so quickly. So much history and time and memories, but they snuck away from you, and other things took their place. How could you hold on? Wait. A bigger question. The biggest. How could you hold on and
let go? -- Deb Caletti
Maybe a person's world can grow bigger in all the right ways, not too wide that it becomes shallow, just large enough to preserve its depth. -- Deb Caletti
If time heals all wounds, and a book can hold a person's entire life, then you can speed up the process with a pulp time warp. -- Deb Caletti
Control was just wishful thinking, and you controlled things to hedge your bets, to be safe, to guard against loss. -- Deb Caletti
You ... You had always made the future feel safe. As long as you were in it too, beside me, I could be okay. -- Deb Caletti
This is what happens when nice people are pushed too far. We give too many chances, and so when we've finally had enough, we are well and truly done. When a nice person shuts a door on you, it's shut for good. -- Deb Caletti
Quitting-it was a dirty word in a place where pilgrims had endured harsh winters and where pioneers had struggled through death and disease to create new lives. Giving up or stepping back or setting aside something you thought you wanted- it was almost a shameful act. -- Deb Caletti
I long for books; I am utterly greedy about them. -- Deb Caletti
I put the guitar back in the case. I can't even look at it anymore. Instead, I want to make brownies. I want an end result there's a recipe for. I want to combine eggs and water and oil and chocolate and flour and sugar and vanilla and get something fulfilling. -- Deb Caletti
It occurred to me then that a lot of life was either about wanting and not having, or having and not wanting. -- Deb Caletti
It was about the way a moment, a single moment, could change things and make you decide to try to be someone different. -- Deb Caletti
We are thickly layered, page lying upon page, behind simple covers. And love - it is not the book itself, but the binding. -- Deb Caletti
You were a stone wall, a fort in high,
unreachable trees, an island, my own island, that no boat could reach. -- Deb Caletti
A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. -- Deb Caletti
A lot of life is just surviving what happens. -- Deb Caletti
People like to have something to turn down, though. They want to be able to say no to some things, because it makes their yes more meaningful. (pg. 25) -- Deb Caletti
I hunt around in my purse. There are no more caramels or fuzzy Altoids, but I find what might be a cough drop. I hold it out to Henry, and he gives me a scared look, like I've just pulled out a knife. -- Deb Caletti
Six? Here? he says.
Six, here. Seven, eight, nine, anywhere. -- Deb Caletti
Who's crazier, anyway: people who struggle honestly, or the people who act like they never do? -- Deb Caletti
Being needed was a handy trick. It could fill you up so full you never even noticed all the places that were empty. -- Deb Caletti
It's hard to see clearly when your eyes are squinched tight out of fear. -- Deb Caletti
This is just one of those annoying and unjust differences between you and your younger sibling ... I was probably fifteen before I could go to a friend's house without giving mom an FBI dossier on the people; Bex can practically hitchhike on the freeway with a mere Have fun, honey. -- Deb Caletti
Holy Christ fate's got a fucking sick sense of humor " he chuckled. -- Deb Caletti
Things that came apart could be put together again, but never exactly the same. -- Deb Caletti
Are you getting your period?" She narrows her eyes.
No! God. I hate that. I hate when every negative act is blamed on your period." Sometimes bitchiness is just bitchiness, happily unattached to anything hormonal. It should get full credit. -- Deb Caletti
It made me wonder how many times we forgive just because we don't want to lose someone, even if they don't deserve our forgiveness. -- Deb Caletti
She wonders if we feel more regret for the things we do or for the things we didn't do -- Deb Caletti
In a lifetime, the recipe always needs amending - more of this, a little less of that, what to do now that the cake has fallen. -- Deb Caletti
Secrets have a shelf life. -- Deb Caletti
Hope was a beacon but it also had the strength of a bully. -- Deb Caletti
You gotta love an old-fashioned word like "quarrelsome." Today she'd just be a bitch. -- Deb Caletti
So I forcibly shove aside my prickles of pissed-off, which is easier than it sounds when millions of little sequined caffeine dancers are doing their big Broadway number on your internal stage. (Page 173) -- Deb Caletti
It doesn't matter if we're young. If you love someone, and it's right ... We can make it the whole way, Crick. -- Deb Caletti
You get to thinking that maybe the diving line shouldn't be animals and people but good and bad. -- Deb Caletti
..They will become afraid to the point of harming people after they've been hurt, even people who try to help them. -- Deb Caletti
He's alright. He's fine, Dad says, his usual line whenever Oliver gets hurt. It means: Go away. Don't baby him. Don't show too much compassion. The other dads do this too. It's some kind of group hysteria, based on some fatherly fear that says compassion equals homosexuality. -- Deb Caletti
Maybe I was being too picky. Maybe I didn't want to be close to anyone. Maybe I'd just be the type who couldn't feel love all the way or something. I couldn't tell what was wrong, but what was wrong was that it just wasn't right. -- Deb Caletti
So I put up with bad behavior in the name of loving the way I thought you were supposed to love. -- Deb Caletti
You've got to say what you mean and mean what you say ... Doubt in your voice is an open door people will shove right through. -- Deb Caletti
Our memories and events in our lives are untidy things. We wish that we can file them away and shut the door, or wish the opposite - that they would stay forever. -- Deb Caletti
They say religion is about love, but you wonder how much of it really is about fear. -- Deb Caletti
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. -- Deb Caletti
What's that about? 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. -- Deb Caletti
Oh, the power of the delete. It felt fabulous. I wished I could go around deleting like crazy. I'd delete suspicious spots on X-rays and malls at Christmas, car troubles and tragic events in history, the world's and my own. -- Deb Caletti
There are those moments, probably few in a life, where before and after split off from each other forevermore in your mind. -- Deb Caletti
Life and our love for others is a balancing act, I understand then; a dance between our instinct to be safe and hold fast, and our drive to flee, to run - from danger, toward new places to feed ourselves. -- Deb Caletti
If your life truths have to be protected like some people keep their couches in plastic then ciao. have a nice life. if we bump into eachoter at Target, i'm the one buying the sour gummy worms and thats all you need to know about me. -- Deb Caletti
Hundreds,' Joe says. 'Hundreds and hundreds. But then again, I'm old.'
So old, Jesus was in your math class,' I say. I crack myself up. -- Deb Caletti
Sometimes you're sure dogs have some secret, superior intelligence, and other times you know they're only their simple, goofy selves. -- Deb Caletti
I don't get why prom is like a mini-wedding these days ... No one should spend that kind of money for a high school dance. -- Deb Caletti
Once again, I am translucent. I could break against rocks. I am ten thousand miles down and ten thousand miles across and around and it's too far and too long and too deep, but there is no black-haired body with wide, soft brown eyes looking into mine and seeing exactly who I am. -- Deb Caletti
True love, even if just in your head, can make you forget how badly things actually suck. -- Deb Caletti
Nice is akin to not walking under ladders or stepping on cracks. It's a superstitious hedging of bets. A part of you thinks your good behavior will ward off evil. Well, apparently that's not true. -- Deb Caletti
It's a simple truth that a secret is something you're ashamed of. -- Deb Caletti
Those questions you have? Whether he's the one, whether you feel about him the way you should, or whether the relationship is going okay? When you're not sure whether you're in love with someone or not, the answer is not. -- Deb Caletti
I understand he's not guilty of anything except maybe loving too much. This boy, he is just ... mine. -- Deb Caletti
Darkness does this. It finds all the places you are hiding in. It finds all the things you are holding onto tightly and makes you let go. -- Deb Caletti
One of the most constant and sustaining truths of my life has been this: I love the library. -- Deb Caletti
I suppose you don't stand much if a chance if you think that happiness us the absence of unhappiness,' he said. 'Good luck ever being happy, then. -- Deb Caletti
[He] made me feel ... large, maybe. In a way I hadn't before. But he didn't know that. For all he knew, I was always that large. It felt good. Fun. Unexpectedly large is sudden, magic levitation - you're high, an impervious Balloon of Joy. -- Deb Caletti
You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear. -- Deb Caletti
You did that when you started to care a lot
you worried he was watching your every move to make sure he really wanted you. You could forget that maybe you were supposed to be doing that too. You forgot it wasn't just you being watched and judged and trying to pass some test. -- Deb Caletti
Goddamn it, Harry. You can't go falling for someone right in front of me after I got my heart broken. It's just plain rude. -- Deb Caletti
My most memorable teacher was Rich Campe, my third-grade teacher at Fairlands Elementary in Pleasanton, California. -- Deb Caletti
Knowledge is so comforting, but so is mystery. -- Deb Caletti
Marriage is like a well-built porch. If one of the two posts leans too much, the porch collapses. So each must be strong enough to stand on its own. -- Deb Caletti
I guess I was inching and crawling my way toward Elizabeth Bennett's words about unconditional love. That it was a dangerous thing without heavy doses of mutual respect. -- Deb Caletti
He was like one great big Sunday afternoon
the kind where you stay in your PJs and watch movies and eat popcorn. Where life is at it's uncomplicated best. -- Deb Caletti
Good can sit in the distance, just beyond your view, waiting, until you go toward it. -- Deb Caletti
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 -- Deb Caletti
Usually you just walk and walk among people who are not of your tribe, and then suddenly, there you are, in a place that feels familiar and known. -- Deb Caletti
[A]pparently, it's okay to WORK as a waitress but not to BE a waitress. -- Deb Caletti
She'd be one of those parents who left a kid behind at a rest stop, driving for miles before she noticed. We'd hear about her on the evening news. -- Deb Caletti
Shakti always said we should have a guy we wanted to keep shaving our legs for. I knew what she meant.
pg. 129 -- Deb Caletti
Because that's how it works after something terrible has happened. You know this is true if something terrible has ever happened to you. A thousand objects take on new meaning. Everything is a reminder of something else. -- Deb Caletti
I've never met a popcorn ball I didn't like. -- Deb Caletti
Empathy took the edge off, and the truth is, we need our edge. Our edge is trying to speak to us, and we are too, too good at shutting it up. -- Deb Caletti
Blessed books - they're a place to be alone, and no one else can come in. -- Deb Caletti
But I didn't want to share everything yet ... I needed that time alone with it first, that delicious time where you replay every moment, where you make what has happened more real and also less - it becomes fact the more you repeat it, but it becomes story, too. -- Deb Caletti
A lady I will be, but a man's accessory, his handbag, no thank you. I will not be someone's ornament. I will not just be someone's honey, baby, sweetheart. -- Deb Caletti
All of my books come from something that I happen to be working out at a given point in my life. It's kind of self-therapy. -- Deb Caletti
Like all kids with divorced parents, I have an abundance of holidays. -- Deb Caletti
The past is a good place for the past. -- Deb Caletti
Does the river make the choice to erode the rock? -- Deb Caletti
When you go looking for rescue, you end up trapped in your own weakness. -- Deb Caletti
Although I love snow, it messes things up terribly around Seattle, with all of our hills. I worry about my loved ones driving. -- Deb Caletti
We made plans. I lay in bed for a long time just feeling delicious anticipation. Then excitement hit. I got up. I had to move a mountain or something. -- Deb Caletti
Maybe we all just wanted someone to believe in. That's all each of us wanted, and it should be so simple, but it never was simple. -- Deb Caletti
When you raise an animal, you live it like your own child. -- Deb Caletti
But if love wasn't just yours first, it was like cutting up and handing out your birthday cake before you blew out the candles. -- Deb Caletti
Men are trouble"
"Amen to that." Peach said.
"You were happily married for fifty years," Miz June said, "I don't understand why you are agreeing."
"He Left Me." Peach said
"He DIED."
"Same thing. -- Deb Caletti
Against the sky, she is exquisitely elsewhere. -- Deb Caletti
I wrote one book, signed with a good agent, and sat back and waited for the phone to ring. I was sure that the great news would come at any moment. Four books later, I finally got that call. -- Deb Caletti
All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we're liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that. -- Deb Caletti
Once an asshole, always an asshole. -- Deb Caletti
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. -- Deb Caletti
Beaches, music, and car rides - they could all bring on a sudden bout of deep, dreamy thoughts. -- Deb Caletti
I became a writer because I love books, and I believe in their power. -- Deb Caletti
I thought I might cry, the way you do when someone gives you some kindness when you most need it but when it seems the most surprising thing. -- Deb Caletti
The word just hangs, until Severin starts the blender and there's only the sound of crunching and grinding vitamins, the silvery core of nourishment, containing every essential thing but the nourishment itself. (pg. 82) -- Deb Caletti
Good things don't always lead to bad ones, Crick. -- Deb Caletti
You could put your confusion and upset and worries into whatever book you were reading. You could sort of set them down in there, and you could come out with your head on a little straighter. I don't why stories worked that way, but they did. -- Deb Caletti
You've got to have someone who loves your body. Who doesn't define you, but sees you. Who loves what he sees. Who you don't have to struggle to be good enough for. -- Deb Caletti
I guess forgiveness, like happiness, isn't a final destination. You don't one day get there and get to stay. -- Deb Caletti
Maybe it was wrong, or maybe impossible, but I wanted the truth to be one thing. One solid thing. -- Deb Caletti
People are secretive when they have secrets. -- Deb Caletti
Someone walking toward you is such a simple, happy-to-be-alive thing. -- Deb Caletti
A person who says "it's your decision" is informing you that your decision sucks. -- Deb Caletti
There's a Reasonable Explanation' is definitely a place you can go, a destination. -- Deb Caletti
... I ignore the message from Jenna, who wants to talk about Kayla and what a bitch she is. I think she actually said "witch" in the voicemail, but if that's what she means, I don't see what a difference the vocabulary makes -- Deb Caletti
Maybe some people just had trouble with forever. -- Deb Caletti
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. -- Deb Caletti
I began to learn the importance of lifting things up and looking underneath. -- Deb Caletti
I was like a chocolate in a box, looking well behaved and perfect in place, all the while harboring a secret center. -- Deb Caletti
We should not give away a moment to anyone who does not deserve it. -- Deb Caletti
Us frogs understand this. -- Deb Caletti
A secret," he said. "A secret is the heaviest thing in the world. -- Deb Caletti
Sometimes you can cattle rope your heart and sometimes you can't, is all. -- Deb Caletti
The world was large, so large. Bigger than it had been before. Family, too, a bigger word. That felt like a good thing. An essential thing. There was power in numbers. -- Deb Caletti
I understood right from the start that every set of library doors were the sort of magic portals that lead to other lands. My God, right within reach there were dinosaurs and planets and presidents and girl detectives! -- Deb Caletti
Knowledge was a personal life preserver you could always count on when you were swimming in the deep end -- Deb Caletti
You could care enough to keep a secret, but you could care enough to tell one, too. -- Deb Caletti
But sometimes, too, you have this little feeling of knowing, this fuzzy, gnawing sense that someone will become a major something in your life. You just know that theirs will be a life you will enter and become a part of. -- Deb Caletti
It was the feeling of not belonging, and longing for your familiar couch and your familiar TV with all those comforting TV people who couldn't see you. -- Deb Caletti
I vow ... to not let the back & forth of forgiveness interrupt the steadiness of love. -- Deb Caletti
When what you want is a relationship, and not a person, get a dog. -- Deb Caletti
I thought about him everyday until then. I started having these conversations with him in my head that you have when you meet someone you sense is going to be important in your life. -- Deb Caletti
There. But then I change my mind. I think of us poor, old human beings doing the best we can, struggling with being either too much of who we are or too little. -- Deb Caletti
I don't want her in my car." says Jenna.
I don't want her in my life." says Michael.
I hope she chokes on her fucking Frappuccino." says Akello. -- Deb Caletti
The people who ask for advice are the ones who already know what they should do. -- Deb Caletti
Nice isn't the same as good," he said. "People are 'nice' for a million of reasons. 'Nice' is the outside. What people get to see. What you want people to see. 'Good' is the inside. And this is a bad person, C. He's making you a fucking prisoner and your letting him -- Deb Caletti
Maybe sometimes you just feel like everything can be taken from you all at once. -- Deb Caletti
But then again, a person could turn ugly. Their actual look could change when their actions were repulsive. -- Deb Caletti
But my apology was a thousand apologies. -- Deb Caletti
Sometimes good choices are really bad ones, wrapped up in so much fear you can't even see straight. -- Deb Caletti
A parent's experience is an unknowable one. How, after all, can a child fathom what it means to be a parent, let alone a parent of a certain generation, with a certain personal history, with a certain spouse, with even a certain child? I get ready for my meeting with -- Deb Caletti
The hurt affects your ability to go forward. -- Deb Caletti
One of the hardest tasks as a human being is knowing when to keep an open mind, and when not to. -- Deb Caletti
I know parental embarrassment usually stops somewhere at fifteen, but he just kept on giving me good reasons. -- Deb Caletti
I don't stop to imagine home and the people in it, because this is so far from home, I am another person entirely. -- Deb Caletti
It's a twisted version of Green Eggs and Ham: I could panic in a train! I could panic on a plane! I could panic on the stairs - I could panic anywhere! -- Deb Caletti
You could try and understand people, you could read books and understand words and concepts and ideas, but you could never understand enough or have enough knowledge to keep away the surprises that both fate and human beings had in store. -- Deb Caletti
There's grief and then there's the loneliness of grief. The way it's just yours and yours alone. -- Deb Caletti
Feminism was supposed to chase away all of those embarrassing vulnerabilities. At least, you were supposed to be aware that acting helpless was something shameful. So was the tendency to hide your own fear behind the toughness of bad boys, if you had that. I had that. I'm being honest here. The -- Deb Caletti
Even when times are dark, the darkest, even when you are sure that life as you know it is over, there are still things that last. -- Deb Caletti
I could forget that part, but it had to have been true. -- Deb Caletti
Fragile things become undone at a frightening speed. -- Deb Caletti
Some people get adoration mixed up with love, and [Juliet] was one of them. -- Deb Caletti
Dread begins to inch in. No. Dread isn't one of those subtle emotions. It moves in and takes over, and then it drips and hands, like Spanish moss. -- Deb Caletti
If reading counted as a sport, I'd be a gold medalist. -- Deb Caletti
He's not coming back. Maybe I do know this after all. Goodbye. I say to him in my head. I say it tenderly. I try to tell him with that one word how sorry I am. -- Deb Caletti
Becoming a YA author was actually a very lucky accident. When I wrote the 'Queen of Everything,' I thought it was a book for adults. -- Deb Caletti
Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them. -- Deb Caletti
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. -- Deb Caletti
Supposedly there's an actual, researched link between extreme creativity and mental illness, and I believe it because I've seen it with my own eyes. -- Deb Caletti
They never told you that stranger might be someone you knew. -- Deb Caletti
back of that woman's dress that night -- Deb Caletti
My dream was, and always had been, to write a book. To be a writer. -- Deb Caletti
It was practically un-American to not set goals and then do everything you could, everything, to reach them. Quitting-it was a dirty word ... -- Deb Caletti
All those maybes are just hope looking for a place to land. -- Deb Caletti
Forever is hard enough without it beginning now. -- Deb Caletti
It is one of those moments where there is so much to say that there is nothing to say, no adequate words, anyway, to speak it all. -- Deb Caletti
A person is never as quiet as they seem, we are thickly layered page lying upon page behind simple covers. -- Deb Caletti
What is uneasy when you are awake in the daylight is terror in the dark honesty of your dreams. -- Deb Caletti
Endings and beginnings sit so close to each other that it's sometimes impossible to tell which is which. -- Deb Caletti
There are so many different fifteens. And eighteens. And forty-twos, for that matter. Mature fifteens and young fifteens and wise fifteens and lost fifteens. And angry fifteens. -- Deb Caletti
The first rule of marital success: Don't marry crazy and don't be crazy. -- Deb Caletti
We try to hold a storm in our own fist but we are not that strong. -- Deb Caletti
Nature is never static, I understand. Change is ever-constant, clouds zipping across a sky. It is dynamic, complicated, tangled, mostly beautiful. A moving forward, something newly gained, means that something is lost, too. -- Deb Caletti
often enough, we owe our good fortune to someone else's loss. -- Deb Caletti
Fear causes the greatest changes, when you think about it. Fear is a monumental force. -- Deb Caletti
The scariest part of forever is that nothing is. -- Deb Caletti
Running away can also be running to. -- Deb Caletti
You can want one thing and have a secret wish for its opposite. -- Deb Caletti
Maybe it was better to be who he thought I was than who I thought I was. -- Deb Caletti
Just because it turned out bad, doesn't mean it wasn't meant. -- Deb Caletti
Know what you desire, but, more importantly, why you desire it. That why was where the trick lay, I realized. Why was a land of trapdoors and hidden places, trees and rocks that looked like one thing, but were actually another. -- Deb Caletti
Often, marriage was solitude, with company. -- Deb Caletti
A relationship could be a place to hide too. -- Deb Caletti
Always. Stay always.
Always. -- Deb Caletti
It's both harder and easier without words. -- Deb Caletti
Fury and devastation are fraternal twins. -- Deb Caletti
When I was a young mother at home with a two year old and a five year old, living on the Eastside in one of those neighborhoods where all the houses look the same, where all the cars look the same and the lawns look the same, I was writing in secret. -- Deb Caletti
Look right at it. Know you can." Dad said. "Look right at that fear. Fear is the biggest bullshitter. -- Deb Caletti
We're as good at talking ourselves out of fear as into it, aren't we? Maybe better. -- Deb Caletti
The night smelled like blackberry leaves and the ocean's nearness, something sweet and deep and full. -- Deb Caletti
You wanted more from people sometimes. And sometimes,you wanted more from yourself. -- Deb Caletti
Nice can have an edge. -- Deb Caletti
You look so good," I say, and s***! Oh god, that's not what I meant. S***! "It looks good. The book. -- Deb Caletti
It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn't have something in the first place. I guess that's what disappointment is- a sense of loss for something you never had. -- Deb Caletti
Love can come when you're already who you are, when you're filled with you. Not when you look to someone else to fill the empty space. -- Deb Caletti
The most insane things can become normal if you have them around you long enough. A mind can't seem to hold anything too crazy for too long without finding a way to make it seem normal. -- Deb Caletti
I mean it's purposeful, even if we don't realize it. The desire to put things in our path, to figure out how to finally leave the behind ... . -- Deb Caletti
Your sibling, after all, is the only other person in the world who understands how fucked up your parents made you. -- Deb Caletti
You've got an in-love feeling, but the relationship is damaging. When do you stop calling it love? -- Deb Caletti
It was all the things you could never understand and could never possess that made you ache. -- Deb Caletti
Hurt is a weapon. Better weapon than most because it doesn't look like one. -- Deb Caletti
Stereotypes are fast and easy, but they are lies, and the truth takes its time. -- Deb Caletti
You take care of the people you love, but it's true, too, that you take care of the things you own. -- Deb Caletti
Right comes with right timing. -- Deb Caletti
If happiness shouldn't make you so miserable, misery shouldn't make you so happy. -- Deb Caletti
No, Mom. I said fine."
"It's just your tone."
Ah, yes- the tone. The nasty traitor. -- Deb Caletti
Anger has grand plans that sometimes look foolish later. -- Deb Caletti