80 Quotes by Kate Mulgrew

I'm scared,' I said, 'There doesn't seem to be any way out.''No,' Beth corrected me, 'there are in fact several ways out, but all of them are painful. You have to know your own tolerance for pain, what you can endure, what you know you can live with and what you can't live without.

I don't know Kitten," she said, zipping up her money belt, "but I'll tell you one thing--if it were a book, I wouldn't be able to put it down.

I often wondered if the pursuit of the illicit was not tacitly encouraged among those in charge, devoted, as they all were, to profit. I could have been carrying on with a psychopathic serial murderer, and no one would have blinked an eye as long as I knew my lines and hit my mark with efficiency and a modicum of verve.

Fear is a starkly felt emotion, it is not nuanced, and as I looked around the room, I saw how it had manifested itself in each of my siblings.

It had taken thirty years for me to understand that regrets do not dissipate, they do not abate into sadness—they harden until they have formed into a small fist that often rests quietly in the pit of your stomach but that can suddenly, and without warning, land a punch so powerful you are left doubled over in pain, gasping for breath.

Homesickness is a sickness of the heart, not of the mind. It is deeply subjective and belongs, inarguably, to the sufferer alone.

You need to call on your best and strongest self.

It takes a very long time to sever a marriage in which children are involved. There is a table, two chairs, and a small pile of bargaining chips. This is how it begins, but it ends with one chair in an empty room. The days darken. The children are slices open and split down the middle. Someone takes an arm; someone takes a foot. The car pulling into the driveway on a Friday afternoon becomes a hearse, and everything is couched in lies. The house of old assumes a silence.

So many memories have dissipated in the mind-blunting of that period, when every thought, every feeling, every action was born out of intense anxiety.