Quotes from Amanda Eyre Ward

When you are small, if you reach out, and nobody takes your hand, you stop reaching out, and reach inside, instead.

Is reading a sport?

Maybe that's what love is, in the end: a shared illusion of safety.

This was one of the pleasures of recovery: you opened the door to the pain and gnawing tedium, but joy came in as well. All of it, all of it, brilliant and clean and true.

Did all siblings revert to their childhood selves when they were together, or was there a way to transition to functional adulthood even while being in one another's lives?

Somehow her later years had become a mirror of her lonely childhood.

Lee had never realized how hideous most of the world was until Rome.

she had to admit the essential difference between Iain and herself: he believed in the possibility of a carnation-strewn, uncomplicated life, and Lola did not. perhaps Iain had thought he could convince her, but grew weary of the endeavor.

as she walked back to her husband, lola thought about lying on her expensive sheets and holding a baby - their baby - to her breast. to the baby, lola would smell like a mother, and the ridiculous chandelier would look like stars.

Meditation is like sobriety in that it doesn't make everything perfect but helps us be okay with how everything is.

Worrying is praying for things you don't want to happen

The most accurate way to know the future is to create it.

Martyrdom was a hard habit to break.

She'd been doing the same things for so long: auditioning, seducing, preening. What if she turned it around, and let the world try to win her for a change?

her insomnia likely had roots in her fear of losing control.

The color of a polar bear's skin? Is? In fact? BLACK!" she cried. Some passengers cheered, but several looked crestfallen. "I'm so sorry," an older man implored his wife. "I really did think it was pink." "I know you did, honey," said his wife morosely, peering into her empty glass.

What he needs," Lee said, "is a father who supports him!" She'd been thirteen, the bravest girl in the world

Your "family of origin" (as her online therapist called them) could be toxic and strange, but they were yours: you could not escape them, for better or worse.

When you're small, if you reach out, and nobody takes your hand, you stop reaching out, and reach inside, instead.

Although she hadn't realized it at the time, Charlotte now understood that proximity mattered.

also, i wanted to kiss you, said lola. come here, said emmett.

and sure enough, emmett's voice rose above the din. at some point, though, a mistake becomes a decision, whether you like it or not. in this, my husband and i were fundamentally different. in my opinion, a mistake required a getaway.

It was only recently that she was beginning to admit to herself how much it hurt to have to be fine.

Charlotte sipped her coffee and gazed at the rocky coastline, the deep green hills, clouds like smoke. How lonely it was to have no witness to her life. No one to guard her passage into slumber, no one to know that she had made it through the night.