Quotes from Allison Winn Scotch

When you lose your parents young, there is simply a blight on your psyche that becomes part of your being. Really,

The right thing to do is often not the most prudent thing to do,

Independence, she's discovered, feels just as good as codependence once did. She's as surprised as anyone to realize this.

conditioned women to eat their own likenesses so they didn't realize that if they banded together, they'd be unstoppable.

I feel like I'm caught in time, caught in a perfect moment inside a snow globe that maybe I'd beg my mom for at a gas station, and I can't find my breath, and my knees feel a little wobbly, and I try to remind myself to remember this moment, to hold on to it forever, to seal it up like we really are in that snow globe and to never let anything shatter the bubble that envelops us, that protects us from everything else around us in the outside world.

being family doesn't mean that you don't hurt each other. It means that you might nick each other from time to time, but you love one another anyway.

Some of our stories are shorter than others. Some last a hundred years. It's not how long you live; it's how you do it while you're lucky enough to have the chance.

bit like a mouse. She thought of MaryAnne again and

that, we are not the type of people who chase down others who spurn us.

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold. —Zelda Fitzgerald

but because in the default of the gender hierarchy, for some reason, the man's need as usual came first.

It sucks that he did that to you." "I was consenting." Cleo didn't know why she kept excusing the situation with that. Consenting and unethical were two different things.

People can be cheering for you, Cleo, and also thinking you're starting to lose your mind. Two things can be true at once.

That was the opposite of regret, she decided. That was living.

fell in love with anyone who loved him back.

But politics was a bit like chess: you had to move with an eye on the whole board, with a 360-degree view of what would come next and the move after that.

It's not like pain just evaporated, she considered. It needed to go somewhere, and maybe shards of it were still lying dormant inside of her, waiting for a resurrection.

The rest of them never considered time, how it moves both so quickly and so slowly that it's always just beyond your grasp.

she never lied to them, never told them things they wanted to hear just to gain their votes. Almost inevitably when you glossed over difficult truths, it meant that you got their votes but eventually lost their trust, and that was not a viable long-term plan. It

Cleo didn't want Bowen, or even Gaby, to tell her how to stay safe in a storm. She didn't want Matty to ask who looked out for her. She did. That was just how it had been since she was seventeen. Besides,

Sometimes—many times—both in life and in marriage, you hope for the sunset overlooking the ocean off a deserted beach in the Mayan Riviera, but what you get is a drive to physical therapy. That's okay. Maybe it's actually how it should be.

Theoretically, politics was about bridging divides. Realistically, it was mostly every man (and woman) for themselves.

There's no time to hold grudges when you've seen how fragile things can really be.