Jan Ellison Quotes

I knew it wasn't the right kind of love, because it required nothing of me. I did not need to worry about keeping it alive or putting it out since it was kept alive quite independently of anything I might or might not do. He would not be someone who demanded anything of me. He would hold on to whatever pieces I offered him, however flawed they might be. It did not bind me to him - somehow, it freed me. Louise

we can achieve happiness not by remaking ourselves, but by subverting unhappiness.

Hope doesn't like to be beaten down, though, does it? Hope is what gets us through. Hope, and the prayer it wants to become.

When we arrived at the hospital, you were in a medically induced coma, which I was made to understand was a sort of freezing of you, a fabricated reprieve from your own body that would allow your internal organs to rest.

Let's all throw unhappiness overboard.

They say the human body can lose 50 percent of its body parts and survive. But it depends on which parts, and which body.

He left without a smile, but he placed something in my chest, a hollow thing that left no room for the hope and happiness that had been condensing there.

If, when I looked, I was not perfect, how could I be beautiful? And if I was not beautiful, how could I be loved? I was not the only woman who ran that script.

How can I be certain I'm not manufacturing a memory to match the evidence? You can't rely on memory. You can't rely on ancient artifacts, either, to tell you a story you can live with. You can rely only on the sculpture of your life you carve out of the available material, the one that stands by while you muddle your way into your future. Patrick

What happens to a marriage? A persistent failure of kindness, triggered at first, at least in my case, by the inequities of raising children, the sacrifices that take a woman by surprise and that she expects to be matched by her mate but that biology ensures cannot be. Anything could set me off. Any innocuous habit or slight or oversight. The way your father left the lights of the house blazing, day and night. The way he could become so distracted at work that sometimes when I called, he'd put me on hold and forget me, only remembering again when I'd hung up and called back. The way he wore his pain so privately, whistling around the house after we'd had a spat, pretending nonchalance, protecting you and your sisters from discord, hiding behind his good nature, inadvertently

Such a terrible word, terminate. A word from a brave new world in which only the flawless are allowed to be born.

Love's young dream, alas is over
Yet my strains of love shall hover

Children will end up a world away, whether you want them to or not - unaware of the havoc being wreaked upon their histories back home.

Actually, when a tree falls, it creates shock waves. And when the shock waves reach an ear or an artificial mechanism like a microphone, they're transmitted into what we call sound," you said. "The shock waves themselves are not sound.

But this time it was her other self I saw, not the dark fairy of want but a middle-aged woman, like the woman I am now, plain, chastened, mortal. The

Where were all the people I loved? I could feel them, flung about, the distance between us a crushing weight that I myself had put there.

They say people who are bipolar see colors differently when in a manic state. What did Emme see when I showed her the photo a few days later?

I suppose unrequited love is the hardest kind to shed because it is not really love at all. It is a half-love, and we are forever stomping around trying to get hold of the other half.

Most never know the condition exists, because the single kidney grows large enough to accommodate

After all, experiencing something is not the same as remembering it. A memory is by its nature a revision.

I told him because I wanted what everybody wants - to be known. To know oneself, and to tell the whole story of that self, and to be loved anyway.

Unrequited love is the best kind of all. But I can tell you with certainty, Robbie, that the other kind of love, the kind I received from your father for more than two decades, is far more necessary.

being born with only one kidney, occurring in roughly one in two thousand people.

He somehow knew it was more important to be reassuring, to seem to be in command of the situation, than to be right. And he was always willing to give in when he was found out to be wrong. The