Kate Kerrigan Quotes

And then I got it. Dan didn't need me to bake cakes, or entertain his uncle, or dress up, or field his mother's expectations, or make his sisters feel important, or chit-chat nicely to his relations. He just needed me to be there. Because when I was with him, it made it easier for him to be with his family. To be able to point across a room and say, "She's with me," to his Uncle Patrick, his mother, his cousins, but most important, to himself.

Dan is not the right guy or the wrong guy. He is just my guy. My husband. The one I chose on the day I chose him, and right now, I plan to go on choosing him for the rest of my life.

A mother draws a map for her child and places herself at the center of it. Her death wipes that map clean. She leaves you knowing you must redraw it to survive and yet not knowing where to start.

If I had to describe myself I would have reluctantly used the label 'new-age liberal', although of course by our very nature we liberals object to putting people in boxes. (Except for 'fascists' and 'racists' and 'conservatives' and 'religious right-wingers' and, in fact, everyone who isn't as 'open-minded' and 'inclusive' as us.)

You can't make another person happy: they have to make themselves happy.

Sometimes, you can hurt another person by being true to yourself, but in the longterm you are doing both of you a favour. You can also hurt them by just being a selfish bitch and there is no excuse for that. Sometimes it is quite difficult to tell the two situations apart.

When you are young, feelings are your truth. Love is how you feel. The years have taught me that love is not an emotion that you feel about someone, but what you do for them.

When you are around something every day you stop seeing it.

Perhaps it is our dreams that keep us young. Older women who cling on to youth may look ghoulish, but perhaps they are happier than those of us who grow old and crochety before our time.

Meeting my brother was the single most incredible, wonderful event that had happened to me in my life up to that point. "I'm going to meet my brother," I said to the taxi driver, just to see how it sounded. Just for the novelty of saying out loud the words "my brother" for the first time. He was uninterested, and it thrilled me that the extraordinary thing I was experiencing seemd to be so ordinary to an outsider.

We both grew so used to each other, so comfortable with the naturalness and ease of our friendship, that we became sloppy about keeping our relationship a secret. It was not that we were physically demonstrative or obviously in love, more that it had become impossible for us to hide our close involvement. We had gradually acquired the unmistakable air of old-love: finishing each other's sentences and speaking to each other with an offhand, presuming intimacy that was eventually noticed.

Reality is just an interpretation. Some people believe only God really knows what's going on: we mortals just make up our own versions of it.

If you take goodwill for granted and get sloppy, you might get away with it once or twice, but you won't get away with it for ever. You should always treat the things that treat you good with respect, because otherwise you will suffer for it. More important than that is the fact that it's just the right thing to do.

Life can be hard, but then we make it even harder by the way we look at it.

It is easy to make friends, but not so easy to keep them in the long term. You cancel a couple of arrangements because you are tired, or it seems too far to travel in traffic, and then next thing you know you have not seen somebody you considered a close friend in over a year. In the small town where I grew up, you saw the same people day in and day out for years. My mother was friends with the girls she went to school with until the day she died. I enjoyed the anonymous freedoms of the city, but now I wondered if I had enjoyed them enough to justify being lonely in my latter years. I missed seeing people every day, meeting old friends and making new ones.

There are lies in tears. The ones we weep most loudly are usually for ourselves, yet how easily we can pass them off as grief.

Part of me wanted to find out the reason why he felt he needed me to be there so badly, then rationalize it away, so he could go without me. Isn't that what you are supposed to do? Communicate, talk about your problems, then reach an agreement about dealing with them. Except I knew that would have just been the scenic route to getting my own way.

Perhaps intimacy is not just loving everything about him, but knowing everything about him - and staying anyway.

In life loyalty is something that you earn and Doreen had more than earned my loyalty over the years. But marriage is a rogue state with its own rules, and one of them is pledging your loyalty to somebody before you can be fully sure that they deserve it, so you stand their ground. You mess with him? You mess with me. That's the new rule. A husband is instant family. He gets the loyalty of a blood tie without doing any of the work.

But that wasn't my way: why should I alter my manner of doing things to please my husband? In any case, it wasn't our way to tiptoe around each other, either.