Quotes from Adrienne Brodeur

Loneliness is not about how many people you have around. It's about whether or not you feel connected. Whether or not you're able to be yourself.

As any magician knows, it is not the smoke and mirrors that trick people; it is that the human mind makes assumptions and misunderstands them as truths.

The lonely feeling comes from not feeling known.

I know that no one's story is simple. And no single story tells the whole truth.

You have no idea how much you can learn about yourself by plunging into someone else's life" Margot said. I smiled at her, not fully understanding what she was saying but feeling a small ping of comprehension, an olive pit smacking the wall of my consciousness. "You can read your way into a whole new narrative for yourself" Margot promised.

I turned to memory, knowing full well that it is revisionist and that each time we remember something, we alter it slightly, massaging our perspective and layering it with new understanding in order to make meaning in the present.

If there was one truth that I'd learned from all my reading, it was this: Happy endings do not apply to everyone. Someone is always left out of that final, jubilant scene. This time, that someone was me.

Why is it that an insult stays with you forever, whereas love and praise passes through you like water through a sieve?

Here was my choice: I could continue down the well-trod path upon which I'd been running for so very long and pass along the inheritance like a baton, as blithely as I did my light hair and fair skin. My daughter could do her best to outrun it... Or I could slow down, catch my breath, and look mindfully for a new path. There had to be another way and I owed it to my daughter to find it.

I felt as if I were watching myself from above, unable to comprehend the happiness of the people around me.

Does your life feel authentically your own?

His response was incomprehensible to me. How could you not want to know...Wasn't curiosity a simple fact of human nature?

Deception takes commitment, vigilance, and a very good memory. To keep the truth buried, you must tend to it. For years and years, my job was to pile on sand - fistfuls, shovelfuls, bucketfuls, whatever the moment necessitated - in an effort to keep my mother's secret buried.

My mother had narrowed her vision and chosen happiness, and I had willingly signed on, both of us ignoring the dangers of the new terrain.

All I knew at that moment was I felt lucky. My mother had chosen me , and, together, we were embarking on a great adventure.

I knew only what pleased my mother; I didn't have a moral compass. It would be years before I understood the forces that shaped who she was and who I became and recognized the hurt that we both caused.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. —ANAïS NIN

We spoke on the phone regularly and turned to text when she could no longer talk. What would I do without her? Her answer came in her final text message to me, written on the morning of her death: Where is Nora Ephron when we need her? I took this to mean "Embrace the mess, live fully, carry on.

In our family, being right trumped being truthful. There was no room for uncertainty, so you never let down your guard.

Desperate to become enriched by books, I sometimes barely remembered what I'd read, yet the unconscious effect of so many sentences felt cumulative, like recurring dreams.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Books will change your lie, Rennie... you have no idea how much you can learn about yourself by plunging into someone else's life' Margo said... 'you can read your way into a whole new narrative for yourself'...

Blink, and you'll miss your treasure. Blink again, and you'll realize that the truth you thought was completely hidden, has materialized some ungainly part of it revealed under new conditions.

To this day, I cannot imagine my parents ever having been in love, nor can I fathom what attracted them to each other. Although there are photographs of them together in our baby albums, I have no memories of them as a married couple.