87 Quotes by Jill Alexander Essbaum

Anna, I only know this: when it is your turn to die - my turn, anyone's - when it is time for you to let go of one life and reach out for another, you will be left with no choice but to hurl yourself willingly into the mother arms of transfiguration. It's not an end. It's a beginning.

I am beholden to my own peculiar irony: to survive I self-destruct.

The only thing we need to know is this: they bring home a paycheck.

Only in the present tense is the subject married to its verb. The action—all action, past and future—comes at the end. At the very end, when there is nothing left to do but act.

Anna was grateful for Ursula - really she was. But Ursula, who was usually never blatantly unkind to Anna, still treated her as a foreign object, a means to the end of her son's happiness (if indeed "happy" was the word for what Bruno was, and Anna was almost sure it wasn't) and the vessel by which her grandchildren - whom she deeply loved - were carried into the world. The help that Ursula offered was for the children's sake, not Anna's.

A mistake made once is an oversight. The same mistake made twice? An abberation. A blunder. But a third time?” Doktor Messerli shook her head. “Whatever’s been done has been done to an end. Your will is at work. You beg a result. A repercussion. A precedent has been established. You will get what you want. And there’s no need to seek out these mistakes. For now it is they who seek you.

Pain is the proof of life.

To each her own fear. But I don’t want to watch my life unfold. I want to unfold it myself, if you will. If there’s something I want to do? I do it. If there’s something I want? I chase it. And I Catch it. If I believe in something, I support it. If none of those things? Then... nothing. Then I let it go.

A LONELY WOMAN IS a dangerous woman.” Doktor Messerli spoke with grave sincerity. “A lonely woman is a bored woman. Bored women act on impulse.