170 Quotes by Lisa Unger

Life is an impossible twist of choice and circumstance. One rarely exists without the other.

The human mind, with all its mystery, bears endless study. Doesn’t it?

When they’re small, they’re part of you, on you in bed, showering with you, climbing onto your lap, holding on to your leg. Slowly, slowly, they start to move away, and if you love them, if you want them to feel safe and free to explore the world, you have to let them go. Mostly.

I mean – are some men just flawed by nature? Or do we enable their bad behavior, make it worse in a way because we hide it, and don’t demand better from them?

It’s strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.

It’s all these choices that we could have made, the things we might have done. We see them with perfect clarity only long after the moment has passed. Just thirty seconds either way, and I wouldn’t have this story to tell you. I wouldn’t be the same person telling it.

Honestly, I tried not to think about my sister much. Or my mother. I have been guilty of doing what it takes to bury most of my memories when it comes to that- from junk food to booze to drugs, there are few poisons with which I haven’t experimented. I’ve found a million ways to keep the demons in a comfortable, quiet stupor, lazing around on my inner couches.

Ralph Waldo Emerson thought of weeds as plants “whose virtues had not yet been discovered.

Maybe that’s all life was, this impossibly complicated helix of choice and accident, things you could control and couldn’t. And when the day was done, the only measure of success was how happy you were, how much you loved and were loved.