52 Quotes by Abigail Thomas

Forget career, forget the future, forget existential worries, just get yourselves a couple of dogs, and everything will be all right.

Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn't work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might; often you need to take the long way around. And if you're writing memoir you're bound to discover things about yourself you didn't realize before, may indeed prefer never to have know, but there you are: progress of some sort.

He is wearing an old overcoat from the Salvation Army in Easton, Pennsylvania. It cost five bucks ten years ago, Louise remembers. Henry is not interested so much in the bargain, he wants ghosts in his clothes. He likes wondering what another man kept in those deep pockets. He writes poems about it.

After all, there are those people we like and dislike, there are those people we love, and then there are those we recognize. These are the unbreakable connections.

I used to get upset if somebody I didn't like loved a book I loved. That's MY book, I'd think.

You had a certain way of saying my name. It was the inflection maybe, something you put into those three syllables. And now you are gone and my name is just my name again, not the story of my life.

She would (if she could) put her arm around the girl she'd been and try to tell her Take it easy, but the girl would not have listened. The girl had no receptors for Take it easy. And besides, "Hey Jude" was on the radio, it was her prayer, her manifesto, almost her dwelling place. She sang it everywhere. The music made her cry then; it makes her cry now. Listening to it now brings back memories so sharp they taste like blood in her mouth.

Good things happen slowly," said a doctor in the ICU months ago," and bad things happen fast." Those were comforting words, and they comfort me today. Recovery is a long, slow process. There are good days and bad days for both of us.

What is this longing, she will want to ask. This troubling feeling of more to come. You can make something out of it, I want to tell her. But that's what her life is for.