Deb Caletti Quotes

It's good to let God pick a man for you. We don't do so well when we pick them ourselves. They end up lipsticks in a drawer, all those wrong colors you thought looked so good in the package.

I don't know why we do it. But sometimes we just swim straight for the net.

It was more work than it seemed, looking through a telescope, as the Earth was continually moving and you had to move along with it. You don't realize how fast this acutally happens, and it's kind of both creepy and wonderful when you stop to think about it. And it makes you realize there's absolutely no way to avoid change. You can sit there and cross your arms and refuse it, but underneath you, things are still spinning away.

Sometimes you've got to make a mess before you clean it up.

One of the hardest tasks as a human being is knowing when to keep an open mind, and when not to.

Oh, the power of the delete. It felt fabulous. I wished I could go around deleting like crazy. I'd delete suspicious spots on X-rays and malls at Christmas, car troubles and tragic events in history, the world's and my own.

Love seems to be something to approach with caution, as if you'd come across a wrapped box in the middle of the street and have no idea what it contains.

He was like one great big Sunday afternoon
the kind where you stay in your PJs and watch movies and eat popcorn. Where life is at it's uncomplicated best.

Six? Here? he says.
Six, here. Seven, eight, nine, anywhere.

At the root of every large struggle in life is the need to be honest about something that we do not feel we can be honest about. We lie to ourselves or other people because the truth might require action on our part, and action requires courage. We say we "don't know" what is wrong, when we do know what is wrong; we just wish we didn't.
Art lets us tell the truth, but even art can be something to hide behind.

I didn't walk over and talk to him, though, not then. If I needed the time for a tree branch to become just a tree branch again and the wind to become just the wind, then a boy, most of all, needed some time to be only a boy.

Sometimes love is a surprise, an instant of recognition, a sudden gift at a sudden moment that makes everything different from then on. Some people will say that's not love, that you can't really love someone you don't know. But, I'm not so sure. Love doesn't seem to follow a plan; it's not a series of steps. It can hit with the force of nature
an earthquake, a tidal wave, a storm of wild relentless energy that is beyond your simple attempts at control.

Darkness does this. It finds all the places you are hiding in. It finds all the things you are holding onto tightly and makes you let go.

We put God in front of terrifying things, and we knocked three times, and we took drugs and shopped too much and obsessed about success, so that the scary stuff would look farther away than it was. We worried, because maybe if we worried enough, it would act like a spell of safety. All those things, superstitions and addictions and anxiety, they were all about hiding from what scared the shit out of us.

But, finally, I had to open my eyes. I had to stop keeping secrets. The truth, thankfully, is insistent. What I saw then made action necessary. I had to see people for who they were. I had to understand why I made the choices I did. Why I had given them my loyalty. I had to make changed. I had to stop allowing love to be dangerous. I had to learn how to protect myself. But first ... I had to look

I've never met a popcorn ball I didn't like.

To be devasted, or to let the truth in, finally, finally, all the way, all the way, all the way, until it fills you with its own strength, with it's own knowledge
that love is light and not darkness, that love that is not good is not wortht of you, that love can only truly be given by those who are ble, those with hearts of quality and with careful hands.

You ... You had always made the future feel safe. As long as you were in it too, beside me, I could be okay.

A person shows signs of clutching on too fast, of being needy, of not hearing the word "no," of jealousy, of guarding you and your freedom. But the signs can be so small they skitter right past you. Sometimes they dance past, looking satiny, something you should applaud. Someone's jealousy can make you feel good. Special. But it's not even about you. It's about a hand that is already gripping. It's about their need, circling around your throat

It was about the way a moment, a single moment, could change things and make you decide to try to be someone different.

So I forcibly shove aside my prickles of pissed-off, which is easier than it sounds when millions of little sequined caffeine dancers are doing their big Broadway number on your internal stage. (Page 173)

A new person in your life gives the rest of you a chance to be new, too. Your life can be whatever you want it to, from there on out. I leaned in and kissed and that is who I was to him, not shy, but bold. Not inhibited, but brave. I was that to him and so I kept being that. It was what I thought he wanted and what he was attracted to, and yet it was this, this exact thing I wasn't even really, that made him the most insecure.

I don't stop to imagine home and the people in it, because this is so far from home, I am another person entirely.

That's what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you're not so lovable.

Cool superiority as a mask for overflowing insecurity.

I thought I might cry, the way you do when someone gives you some kindness when you most need it but when it seems the most surprising thing.

We were right to come here, if only because the ocean reminded you that impossible things were possible. Miles and miles of the deepest waters that moved like clockwork were possible. Creatures like jellyfish and sea urchins were, too. Millions and jillions of the tiniest grains of sand to form one long, soft beach - yep, even that was possible.

The favorite game of temperamental people is Try to Guess Why I'm Ticked Off. (Contestant number one, Why do YOU think he's pissed off? Why, I'm not sure, Bob, but I'm going to go with 'Because I Left the Faucet Dripping.' BEEP. I'm sorry, that's incorrect. The correct answer is: 'Because You Happen to Exist.')

But the one thing my illness did make me realize is how necessary it is to ignore the dangers of living in order to live. And how much trouble you can get into if you can't. We all have to get up every morning and go outside and pretend we aren't going to die ... We concentrate on having little thoughts so we don't have BIG THOUGHTS. It's like those days when you've got a really bad pimple but you still have to go to school. You've got to convince yourself it's not so bad just so you can leave the house and actually talk to people face to face. You've got to ignore the one big truth
life is fatal.

The people who ask for advice are the ones who already know what they should do.

Our memories and events in our lives are untidy things. We wish that we can file them away and shut the door, or wish the opposite - that they would stay forever.

I've always felt that a heart is meant to be given to only one person at a time. And, too, when it moves on, it moves on for good.

There was something about her mouth that made me feel possibilities ... the way a train ticket holds possibilities, the way a boat docked at sunset does, the way a voice on the radio announcing victory does. A mouth can have that it can seem brave, and bold. Finite and infinite. After a war, you need both of those things. "Why don't you kiss me, she said. "Celebrate a new world." And so I did. I could not forget that kiss. I still cannot. I put my fingertips to her face. Indeed,changed that day, but the change in life was no smaller or less significant. The moment took my sorrow and made it swarm the streets in victory, shouting in joy and rightness, and from that I have never quite recovered.

I felt a constant, low-flying desperation, the kind you feel when you are trying, trying, trying to get something you will never, ever get.

Sometimes I've even wished there was a human pause button, where you could choose some point in your life where you could stay always.

I tended to give a book a chance and another chance and another, sometimes seeing it all the way to the end, still hoping for for it turn out different. Maybe I was confused about what you owed a book. What you owed people, for that matter, real or fictional.

There are so many different fifteens. And eighteens. And forty-twos, for that matter. Mature fifteens and young fifteens and wise fifteens and lost fifteens. And angry fifteens.

This was what happened after you'd been together with someone a long time. You loved that it was old and worn and comfy, but sometimes it was old and worn and comfy.

I shouldn't have to be a liar to make someone love me. I shouldn't be so afraid of losing someone that I'll do anything to make them stay.

Just because it turned out bad, doesn't mean it wasn't meant.

My most memorable teacher was Rich Campe, my third-grade teacher at Fairlands Elementary in Pleasanton, California.

You never know what a day will bring, which is both the good news and band news of life.

You take care of the people you love, but it's true, too, that you take care of the things you own.

Does the river make the choice to erode the rock?

Yeah. When you want what's real and you try to find that in high school, you might as well be looking for a mossy rock beside a babbling brook on the corner of Sixth and Pine in downtown Seattle.

You're an asshole alive, you're still an asshole dead.

Nice can have an edge.

Butterflies are trapped first, before they are free.

What is more like love than the ocean? You can play in it, drown in it ... it can be clear and bright enough to hurt your eyes, or covered in fog, hidden behind a curve of roads and then suddenly there in full glory. It's waves come like breaths, in and out, body stretched to forever in it's possibilities, and yet it's heart lies deep, not fully knowable, inconceivably majestic.

But what I wanted back had never really been there. He was a temporary illusion, a mirage of water after walking in the desert. I had made him up. And he could have killed me. You've got to stop the ride sometimes. Stop it and get off.

This is the problem with danger, isn't it? You can even be warned and ignore the warning. Danger can seem far away until the sky grows dark, and a bolt of fury heads straight toward you.

I like those very realistic paintings that look like photographs, or novels that are so much like actual life that you feel understood.

Someone walking toward you is such a simple, happy-to-be-alive thing.

I liked the idea of bouncy, open-air Jeeps and I liked the outfits with all the pockets, only I didn't really want to live in Africa and be shot by poachers/get malaria/get stabbed to death.

Being needed was a handy trick. It could fill you up so full you never even noticed all the places that were empty.

The first rule of marital success: Don't marry crazy and don't be crazy.

A lot of life is just surviving what happens.

If you look up "charming" in the dictionary, you'll see that it not only has references to strong attraction, but to spells and magic. Then again, what are liars if not great magicians?

Control was just wishful thinking, and you controlled things to hedge your bets, to be safe, to guard against loss.

She does not read it the way she and Kat used to read books - devouring them with the speed of two people famished for words, ideas, and beautiful sentences that make you feel everything. No, she reads Endurance the way a person might read the Bible - in small passages, repeated again and again, to help her stay grounded. To help her persevere, and understand her place in the world.
She has missed books, but she's been afraid of them, same as music. Books make you feel things hard. They hit the tender spots. Books remind her of her and Kat, but also of her old self, too, the mostly carefree self. The girl who was just so happy to come home from the library with a big stack of new stuff to read. Books were dangerous.

I suppose you don't stand much if a chance if you think that happiness us the absence of unhappiness,' he said. 'Good luck ever being happy, then.

When I was a young mother at home with a two year old and a five year old, living on the Eastside in one of those neighborhoods where all the houses look the same, where all the cars look the same and the lawns look the same, I was writing in secret.

Once again, I am translucent. I could break against rocks. I am ten thousand miles down and ten thousand miles across and around and it's too far and too long and too deep, but there is no black-haired body with wide, soft brown eyes looking into mine and seeing exactly who I am.

The hope was, people like me got to finally find our place in college or in the actual world. People who understood this told you that high school wasn't the actual world, that it was more like a temporary alternate reality you were forced to believe in for four years. A video game you played, where you could never get to the next level no matter how hard you tried.

This is not just a simple story of "money can't buy happiness." Or maybe that's just what it is. And if it is, why shouldn't it be? Because if this is something we are already supposed to know, then why don't we know it? Why do we chase and scrabble and fight for things to flaunt, why? Why do we reach for power over other people, and through the thin superiority of our possessions, believe we have it? Why do we let money make people bigger, and allow those without it to be made smaller? How did we lose the truth in the frantic, tribal drumbeat of more, more, more?

My father, Bobby Oates*, said that love at first sight should send you running, if you know what's good for you. It's your dark pieces having instant recognition with their dark pieces, he says. You're an idiot if you think it means you've met your soul mate. So I was an idiot. He looked so nice. He was so nice.

often enough, we owe our good fortune to someone else's loss.

I'm thinking we ought to rethink the whole self-esteem thing. It should almost be a dirty word. I mean, look at Kayla. She has the intelligence of a tree stump, and its sense of humour. She's less about real attractiveness than she is about advertising ... She's the kind of girl who shows how hot she is because she has nothing else to offer, who doesn't realise that hotness has an expiration date. Yet, I'm still a little nervous talking to her like she's holding a lottery ticket she just might or might not decide to hand over to me. It is nuts, if you stop to think about it. I give give her this power, and it's kind of like voting some idiot into office. But hey, we're good at that, too.

When your arms are out wide, you'll capture love and joy and golden moments but other things, too. Mistrust will sneak in on a wave of that joy, and complications will ride the backs of the golden moments, and there will be both love and the risks of love. That's the way it is. That's the design.

It's shocking the things we call love.

But then again, a person could turn ugly. Their actual look could change when their actions were repulsive.

There. But then I change my mind. I think of us poor, old human beings doing the best we can, struggling with being either too much of who we are or too little.

Truth was funny, because it was an insistent thing, maybe as powerful and insistent as some force of nature, the push of water or wind. You could keep it out only so long, but it had its own will and its own needs, and maybe you could keep it at bay with lies, but not for long, not for always.

When you are a human being, you must decide and decide again to go forward. You must, or you won't move from the worst that life offers...

I'd always thought telling the truth to other people was hard, but maybe that was a snap compared to telling the truth to yourself. Sometimes we just refused to know what we knew.

The night smelled like blackberry leaves and the ocean's nearness, something sweet and deep and full.

I was a book lover from the beginning. I loved, love, words and images and ideas, the ways a book can make you feel things deeply or help you understand something you never even knew there were words for.

What is it about hairdressers? You tell them 'not too short' and some part of their hairdresser brain hears this as 'whack the shit out of it.' If you never say, 'not too short,' everything is fine. You say it, & it's a guarantee you'll come out ready for the military>

The way two people can end up in the same place, find each other in a crowd, and change their lives and the lives of the people around them forever ... It makes you believe in fate. And fate gives love some authority. Like it's been stamped with approval from above, if you believe in above. A godly green light. Some destined significance.

If reading counted as a sport, I'd be a gold medalist.

Quitting-it was a dirty word in a place where pilgrims had endured harsh winters and where pioneers had struggled through death and disease to create new lives. Giving up or stepping back or setting aside something you thought you wanted- it was almost a shameful act.

It's a simple truth that a secret is something you're ashamed of.

I may be nervous," I say.
"Okay, I'm really glad you said that, because I just went to the back room to put on more deodorant." Sebastian says.

Dread begins to inch in. No. Dread isn't one of those subtle emotions. It moves in and takes over, and then it drips and hands, like Spanish moss.

If your life truths have to be protected like some people keep their couches in plastic then ciao. have a nice life. if we bump into eachoter at Target, i'm the one buying the sour gummy worms and thats all you need to know about me.

Cars are all jammed up all along the road and a light turns red and someone honks. In every one of those cars there is a story or a hundred stories. For every light on in al of those huge city buildings there is a story. No one knows what I am about to face and no one knows my story and neither do I right then.

But an apology too - you think you're giving something, but you're not. You're really asking for something. You're asking for forgiveness, you're asking for the other injured person to make it okay for you. Apologies were harder work for the person getting one than the person giving one.

Stories help you understand your life,
she'd say. Stories can heal. And I think she's right, because why do old guys back from the war tell their experiences again and again? Why did people of long ago make up elaborate tales of mythical beings? Why do people sit in a room and reveal the pieces of their life to doctors trained to listen, and why are they cured by doing that? Why
libraries? Come on, all those stories, pieces of life told again and again. We need them. Stories are a ritual that put all the crazy shit about life into a form that makes sense. We're all like the little kids that need to be read the same story over and over again.

A lady I will be, but a man's accessory, his handbag, no thank you. I will not be someone's ornament. I will not just be someone's honey, baby, sweetheart.

I wrote one book, signed with a good agent, and sat back and waited for the phone to ring. I was sure that the great news would come at any moment. Four books later, I finally got that call.

The truest thing about truth was that it needed to be seen no matter what it was and no matter how it came to you.

Now, whenever she thinks of it, she is confused about what she did and didn't cause. She is confused about desire, and her own desirability. She is confused about her own sexuality. It should be hers to wield as she wishes, she knows this, but why - even if she isn't wielding it, exactly, even if she's just being herself - is there the sense of a shameful invitation, or even an invitation at all? She knows she should be able to invite if she wants to invite, to say no if she wants to say no, yes if she wants to say yes, to allure or not allure, to just simply feel good about what her body is and does and how it looks.

Sorry, sorry, sorry. Oh, you can pile on as many as you want, but the guilt is still there, like that pea under all those mattresses.

My father said that love at first sight should send you running, if you know what's good for you. It's your dark pieces having instant recognition with their dark pieces, he says. You're an idiot if you think it means you've met your soul mate. So I was an idiot.

She can't truly outrun her future, but you can't tell her body that.

Courage, traveler. Weird. It's coming from inside her. Hold your little map and shout to the darkness, it says. Shout this: You are nothing, darkness, against something as old as love. Shout: I will walk right through you, darkness, because I am, and I will be. This boldness-she's felt it before. In the truck, when she first saw Billy. No, before that, when she was brave, so brave, and brought Anna to the shore. This is how you save yourself? This small voice inside? This microscopic cell of belief, allowed to divide? Yep. Uh-huh. The voice is your own personal sword and shield-remember that. Remember that every hard day.

It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn't have something in the first place. I guess that's what disappointment is- a sense of loss for something you never had.

It occurred to me then that a lot of life was either about wanting and not having, or having and not wanting.

I long for books; I am utterly greedy about them.

We forget that just because something is honest it is not necessary the truth.