9 Quotes by Alison Espach

I rolled the ball of muffin and I waited and after my mother said, "That you should really take a multivitamin," my father threw up his hands in disgust, and I was positive I had no family at all, certain it was not my mother but the solar wind that carried me into the universe.

All fathers are liars . . . If you want to be a father, you have to be prepared to become a liar.

Inside my house, nobody was home, except everybody, but it was easy to feel like those were one and the same.

Adults were constantly auditioning, but for what?

My father moved out a week later. I hugged him at our front door and couldn't bear to watch him leave with so much luggage.

Cry your guts out because nothing is sadder than an adult who forgets how to be a child.

When it was real it wasn’t funny. When you touched someone, they were always with you. When his mouth was on mine, we held the same breath in the same moment, and when he was naked, his body was covered in tiny black hairs that stuck to my clothes even after I washed them. He had sowly become a part of me and when he was cruel, or cold, or acted like we couldn’t go on like this anymore it felt like he was ripping my limbs off, one at a time.

And yet, every day, it seemed, I was discovering new ways to feel fourteen again. Everyday, there were new ways to be disappointed by the conversation, by the weather.

Being an adult, it seemed, was horrible. But being a child was awful too, and moving from one state to the other only meant you were moving closer to death, with so much and so little to talk about all at the same time, and how was that even possible?