47 Quotes by Melanie Benjamin

Never would I allow my size to define me. Instead I would define it.

There is always so much talk about the sins of the fathers but it is the sins of the mothers that are the most difficult to avoid repeating.

People do that, of course – they come into your life, illuminate some dark corner you’d not even known was there, then they disappear. True connection is rare, but that’s just the way it is.

Unlike men, women got less sentimental as we aged, I was discovering.

They are in danger of becoming immune to the horrors surrounding them. This is what an occupation does – it wears you down until you accept evil. Until you can no longer fully define it, even. Let alone recognize it.

Babe Paley simply never made an empty gesture, and here she was, assembling a parade of them. But her feet, her hands, her mind, her heart, were all restless. Truman.

His death notice included the mention that in 1880, he had married Alice in Wonderland. I like to think he would have been pleased at that, but the truth is he was the only one to whom this didn’t matter at all.

My head grew muddled with it all; the silly ways adults acted with one another, never saying what they meant, trusting in sighs and glances and distance to speak for them instead. How dangerous that was! How easy it must be to misinterpret a sigh or a look.

For despite the pain of loss, as time went on, the memory of those I’d loved warmed my heart more than grieved it.