33 Quotes by Lisa Graff

Trying hard and being a good person didn’t always mean good things would happen to you. But it did mean that others might try on your behalf.

You can’t get where you’re going without being where you’ve been.

Some people aren’t good at anything. Some people just really like donuts.

And you couldn’t be anywhere at all without having been almost there for a while.

When you do choose to speak, she told me, speak truths.

Well, that’s the thing about knots, isn’t it? If you don’t know the trick, it’s a muddled predicament. But in fact each loop of every knot is carefully placed, one end twisting into the other in a way you might not have expected. I find them rather beautiful, really.

Sometimes memories hit like a wallop, all of a sudden, and hard. Other times, for no reason that anyone can explain, memories take much longer to sink in. They seem to meander a bit before choosing which mind to settle into.

And every one of these days, from dawn to dusk, has been more or less the same. Far from grand but not too horrible, either, like a pebble underneath your sock that’s not quite large enough to bother removing.

Memory is a curious thing. Some details stick in our minds like peanut butter on crackers, and refuse to budge, as much as we might wish they would. Other memories – heavy ones sometimes, ones that seem unbudgeable – can be plucked right out when we least expect it. Lost memories leave remnants, of course, flavors that linger in the mind, but it’s difficult to taste things when you don’t know they’re there.