429 Quotes by Deb Caletti

Just that, is one of those uncommon moments, those times when you don’t wish for something else, for even one thing to be different; when you have no other needs or worries, where your insides are calm, and everything you were ever restless about, anything that had ever given you angst, is quieted to stillness. No steel ball in your chest, no breathless fear. No blue numbness of nearly passing out, no nagging doubts of the backstage mind. All of that, forgotten. It is just rightness, so rare.

Fragile things become undone at a frightening speed.

Family was even a bigger word than I imagined, wide and without limitations, if you allowed it, defying easy definition. You had family that was supposed to be family and wasn’t, family that wasn’t family but was, halves becoming whole, wholes splitting into two; it was possible to lack whole, honest love and connection from family in lead roles, yet to be filled to abundance by the unexpected supporting players.

You wouldn’t match Melanie and me up, and if we hadn’t gotten stuck together as lab partners in junior high science, I doubt if we’d have matched us up either. I’m not sure why we even stuck, except that we each probably find the other to be entertaining... Besides I feel like it was a personal mission of mine to broaden Melanie’s world, though I think she felt the same for me.

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.

More, much more, will happen after this. Things involving maps and books and true love and tragedy, tragedy like you wouldn’t believe. But fine things too. The best ones.

In the two months I had also dated Justin Fellowes, this guy in my Spanish class, though after three weeks we decided we should “see other people,” which in my case was a joke, but it beat hearing him remark on everything I ate. ‘I don’t know why girls are always on a diet,’ he’d say when I ordered a Diet Coke, and ‘You should watch your starch intake’ when I had a muffin.

He’s going for wisdom but the real wisdom is knowing there sometimes isn’t any.

When it comes to sisters, it seems one stays and one goes, one remains bound and the other is set free. She is who she is in good part because of who Gloria isn’t. In order to be herself, in order to be different from her sister, she had to take what was left over, the opposite, unchosen road. She is both glad and furious about it.