119 Quotes by J. Courtney Sullivan

A million different ways. I think of what my mother did when I was a kid, confiding in me about my father’s affairs. Needing me to indulge her every insecurity. A child shouldn’t be so aware of her mother’s demons. A child shouldn’t know her mother has demons at all. Is that right?

If things had been different, she would be in Carolyn’s place right now. She didn’t want that sort of existence, but there was something so attractive about the security of feeling like you had stopped moving toward your life, and actually arrived.

As you made your way through life, there were people who stuck, the ones who stayed around forever and whom you came to need as much as you needed water or air. Others were meant to keep you company for a time. In the moment, you rarely knew which would be which.

She had once said that she believed the women’s liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.

And anyway, once you allowed yourself to picture such a scenario, it couldn’t happen. That was just the way life went.

Timing was everything when it came to being a woman – the moment you entered the world could seal your fate.

I think it all comes down to power. And the individual. Women are every bit as capable of being evil and corrupt as men are. They just haven’t had as much opportunity to show it, historically speaking.

We don’t always do the things our parents want us to do, but it is their mistake if they can’t find a way to love us anyway.

She wished more than anything to be that child again. Someone for whom all decisions were made, and love was background noise; uneventful, absolute.