Home > Work > Handle with Care
121 " Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was......Parents aren't the people you come from. They're the people you want to be, when you grow up. I sat between my mother and my father, watching strangers on TV carry in Shaker rockers and dusty paintings and ancient beer tankards and cranberry glass dishes; people and their hidden treasures, who had to be told by experts that they'd taken something incredibly precious for granted. "
― Jodi Picoult , Handle with Care
122 " Even though it hurt, there are kinds of pain you couldn't speak out loud. "
123 " I had always been suspicious of women who described the dissolution of their marriages as something that happened overnight. How could you not know? I'd thought. How could you miss all those signs? Well, let me tell you how: you were so busy putting out a fire directly in front of you that you were completely oblivious to the inferno raging at your back. "
124 " When we sat down on the couch again, you curled up against my side, like you used to when you were a toddler. What I wanted to say to you, but didn't, was this: Don't use me as your model. I'm the last person you should look up to. "
125 " You don’t have to say I love you to say I love you,” you said with a shrug. “All you have to do is say my name and I know.”“How?”When I looked down at you, I was struck by how much of myself I could see in the shape of your eyes, in the light of your smile. “Sa Cassidy,” you instructed.“Cassidy.”“Say…Ursula.”“Ursula,” I parroted.“Now….,” and you pointed to your own chest.“Willow.”“Can’t you hear it?” you said. ” When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it’s safe inside your mouth. "
126 " I closed my eyes and curled my fists around the things I knew for sure:That a scallop has thirty-five eyes, all blue.That a tuna will suffocate if it ever stops swimming.That I was loved.That this time, it was not me who broke "
127 " When I kept someone else from getting hurt, did I hurt you? "
128 " People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that’s not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more. "
129 " I thought that if I loved you hard enough, I could move mountains for you; I could make you fly. It didn’t matter to me how that happened—just as long as it did. I wasn’t thinking of who I might hurt, only who I could rescue. "
130 " most people who offer their help do it to make themselves feel better, not us. "
131 " Can’t you hear it?’ you said. ‘When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it’s safe inside your mouth. "
132 " Now, I was starting to see that what looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it. "
133 " Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late we've wounded the people we are trying to protect. "
134 " The world would be a much easier place if, instead of handing over superstuffed syllables all the time, we just said what we really meant. Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest - like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn't noticed - weren't sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward. If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were I'm sorry. "
135 " Maybe it was because I wanted to control one part of me that had been uncontrollable, so the rest of me would fall into line. "
136 " What people said they would do and what people actually did were two very different things. "
137 " Here's what I hadn't realized : the mother you haven't seen for almost 36 years isn't your mother. She is a stranger. Sharing DNA does not make you fast friends. This was not a joyous reunion. It was just awkward. "
138 " people who didn’t talk about their problems got to pretend they didn’t have any. People who discussed what was wrong, on the other hand, fought and ached and felt miserable. "
139 " Sometimes I think there’s a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that’s where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can’t help but do something inappropriate. "
140 " Sometimes I think there’s a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that’s where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can’t help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite. And just at this moment, it chose to rear its ugly head. "