Lisa Unger Quotes

It was so much simpler to see other people's wrongs and make them pay. It was so much harder to have compassion, to see yourself in others and find forgiveness.

We can't hold on to anyone or anything, you know. We lose everything except that which we carry within us.

Never talk to strangers. If someone ever tries to take you, fight with everything you have. Scream as loud as you can. (He'd never told her what to do if the man was too strong and there was no one to hear her screaming.)

The universe conspires to reveal the truth and to make your path easy if you have the courage to follow the signs.

There was something eternal about loss, something endless. You could always lose the things you had, but you couldn't always get back the things you lost.

But did you know that eyewitness testimony is often totally unreliable? The human memory only records events through the filter of its own frame of reference. We try to fit the information we receive into schemas, units of knowledge that we possess about the world that correspond with frequently encountered situations, individuals, ideas, and situations. In other words, we often see things as we expect to see them, or want to see them, and not always as they are.

I have started taking the pills and I pray that everyone is right, that I have been sabotaged by my own brain chemicals. And that the little blue pill is going to put things right again.

Eloise thought that justice was a funny thing. It was a big idea, a romantic one. It was imagined like a satisfying end to a story.

You can put on a mask and a costume for the rest of the world, but you can't hide from the people who changed your diapers.

You [meaning mothers] said good-bye a little every day
from the minute they left your body until they left your home.

I liked how she never offered any physical comfort. I appreciate people who have a healthy respect for personal boundaries. Our culture is too touchy-feely; everyone wants a hug these days. But Dr. Cooper just sat and was present.

My uncle Max was a mountain, a shooting star, a big bear of a man, a piggyback ride waiting to happen, his pockets full of candy and, later money, or whatever the particular currency of our ages happened to be. He was rock concerts, baseball games, he was yes when my parents were no, he was a consolation for every disappointment.

Kindness, I think, comes from learning hard lessons well, from falling and picking yourself up. It comes from surviving failure and loss. It implies an understanding of the human condition, forgives its many flaws and quirks.

I thought about my brother. I hated him. Hated him like a child hates a fallen hero. I hated him for his unlimited potential and his failure to realize it. I hated him because I could see everything that was wonderful about him, how brilliant, how beautiful he was, and how he had turned his back on everything he could have been, cast it off like a designer suit for which he'd paid an obscene sum and never wore.

I'm a 'bound book' kind of girl. I have a Kindle, and I enjoy it for some things, like convenience or instant gratification, or all the little things that you can do with them.

When you start to really know someone, all his physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell in his energy, recognize the scent of his skin. You see only the essence of the person, not the shell. That's why you can't fall in love with beauty. You can lust after it, be infatuated by it, want to own it. You can love it with your eyes and body but not your heart. And that's why, when you really connect with a person's inner self, any physical imperfections disappear, become irrelevant.

We count so much on politeness, those of us who are hiding things. We count on people not staring too long, or asking too many questions.

Judgment is such a useful shield, isn't it? We can hide behind it, rise above others on its crest, keep ourselves safe and separate.

I agree. I have a therapist now, one with whom I'm actually honest, and we've been over the events of my life again and again - rehashing without judgment the things I've done, the things that have been done to me, and how I ultimately saved myself.

Choices turned to consequences, opinions turned to judgments, and admiration turned to envy. Envy curdled everything, like lemon in milk.

I couldn't leave there without carrying some of her sadness and loneliness with me like a cloak. There was a smell that I've come to think of as life rot. Where a life has spoiled, gone bad through lack of use.

I should have been sending up flares, instead I was offering smiles.

An awareness of your own worth is the most attractive quality in the world.

Parenthood wasn't about blood or biology, he found; it was about a joyful willingness to give yourself over, to subordinate your own needs for someone else's. When you loved your kids, you'd give up everything to keep them safe and make them happy, and you didn't care about the other things, the ones that went away.

The girl with the pictures on her skin

But words are all we have, their essence the only passage into our centers, the only way we can make people feel what we feel

We may say we're looking for love, following dreams, chasing the dollar, but aren't we just looking for a place where we belong? A place where our thoughts, feelings, and fears are understood? - Ridley Jones

In that moment,feeling my isolation in a way I never had before, I thought about calling her. But I didn't want to hear the fear and disappointment in her voice. I didn't want to to deal with her expectations of me. Maybe that's why we choose to isolate ourselves, those of us who do. Because in so many ways, it's just easier.

And we stood like that. The joining of hands is highly underrated in the acts of intimacy. You kiss acquaintances or colleagues, casually to say hello or good-bye. You might even kiss a close friend chastely on the lips. You might quickly hug anyone you knew. You might even meet someone at a party, take him home and sleep with him, never to see him or hear from him again. But to join hands and stand holding each other that way, with the electricity of possibilities flowing between you? The tenderness of it, the promise of it, is only something you share with a few people in your life.

Memory is elastic, and no two people have the same version of any given event. Our versions of our own lives are necessarily fictional to some degree, wouldn't you agree?

But then again, we're all on death row, aren't we? Most of us just don't know it.

They don't find peace. It's pure bullshit. When something unspeakable happens, or when you do something unspeakable, it changes you. It takes you apart and reassembles you. You are a Frankenstein of circumstance, and the parts never fit back quite right and the life you live is a stolen one. You don't deserve to walk among the living, and you know it.

We had a great friendship, good sex, a shared passion for the dinosaur room at the Museum of Natural History and Haagen-Daz French Vanilla ice cream. But love is more than the sum of its parts, isn't it?

Writers are first and foremost observers. We lose ourselves in the watching and then the telling of the world we find. Often we feel on the fringes, in the margins of life. And that's where we belong. What you are a part of, you cannot observe.

When someone we love dies suddenly and tragically, it's like seeing the curvature of the earth. You always knew it was round, a contained sphere floating in space. But when you see the bend in the horizon line, it changes your perspective on everything else.

All she could think of was how pure and unblemished, how soft and pink his baby skin had been. How his wonderful body, small and pristine, used to feel in her arms, how she'd kiss every inch of him, marveling at his beauty. When she was a new mom, she'd felt like she couldn't pull her eyes away. Now she cast her eyes back at her catalog quickly, not wanting to look at her own son, at what he'd seen fit to do to his beautiful body ... Not a big deal, Mom, he said reading her mind ... Lot's of people have tattoos.

Dysfunction isn't a choice, it's a disease.

As far as Eloise was concerned, there were only two ways of being in the world. You either walked through life acting out of love, or you acted out of fear.

We hate our parents for having their own lives, don't we, for making decisions for themselves that don't seem to take us into account. They're not people, not really. They're parents; how dare they live and love and die without us?

Everything is autobiographical, and nothing is autobiographical. That's fiction.

What we think of as our "gut instincts" are really a very complex mosaic of past experiences, deep-seated hopes, fears, desires.

I love a big, character-rich story with a dark heart, with a compelling mystery or some kind of ticking clock at its center. I want to be lured in by prose, captured by character, and bound by stellar plotting to keep turning the pages.

Maybe I have this fascination with the dark side because I live in the light. I don't have any dysfunction, and I've never experienced trauma.

I loved him so much. It didn't change all the reasons we couldn't be together, but it kept me returning to his body, kept my skin seeking his skin over and over again in the sad dance we did.

Motherhood was an ever widening circle of good-byes.

I've had my fill of cool, Willow. These days it's kindness, honesty, and stability that impress me.

It's strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.

I love the village in my computer. There's little validation in the day-to-day life of a writer; sometimes we ache for a connection.

Not that she didn't about fighting losing battles.

As parents, we must accept that our children are who they are. We can't make them into something we want, or be disappointed in them because they don't meet our artificial expectations.

But that's the thing about mental illness; there's no such thing as a cookie-cutter diagnosis. We're all crazy in our own special way. Some of us just have it worse than others.

I live for the blank page.

Anger is not the absence of love. Anger broke you apart. Love and anger wrap around each other and becomes one living thing inside your heart.

Michael Koryta is that rare author who is at once a compelling story teller and a fantastic writer. From the first sentence of THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD, you'll be under his spell. His characters are living, breathing people you'll care about; his setting is a place you'll visit and stay-long after you've decided to leave because you're scared. You can't leave; you're trapped. There are too many nerve-jangling, beautifully written, razor sharp moments and you won't want to miss a single one. This is an absolute sizzler.

If I weren't a writer, I'd be a psychiatrist.

Adopt the pace of nature, said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her secret is patience. Ray

... there was only one rule. Work hard and be nice, and everything would go just fine. That should be the rule for life, too, Emily thought. But, of course, that wasn't how things went.

The woman I was seems hopelessly naive. I envy her.

That's what they do, psychopaths. They figure out your language, your currency, your needs, your dreams and fears. Then they figure out how to use those things to get what they want from you. Most

Maybe that's all life was, this impossibly complicated helix of choice and accident, things you could control and couldn't. And when the day was done, the only measure of success was how happy you were, how much you loved and were loved.

I've always had this in a kind of worst-case dark imagination. I want to know what the dark form in the window is. I want to know what the noise under the staircase is.

Others of us are lost. We're forever seeking. We torture ourselves with philosophies and ache to see the world. We question everything, even our own existence. We ask a lifetime of questions and are never satisfied with the answers because we don't recognize anyone as an authority to give them. We see life and the world as an enormous puzzle that we might never understand, that our questions might go unanswered until the day we die, almost never occurs to us. And when it does, it fills us with dread.

You know," he said. He paused a minute, as though picking his words carefully. "It's okay to disappoint people sometimes. It's okay for us to say no simply because we don't want to do something." Intellectually,

What had amazed him, what amazed him still, even after all these years, was how quickly he'd stepped out of himself. He'd slipped off every convention and moral that had defined him, a great cowl that fell to the floor with the unfastening of a single closure. The person beneath it was someone he barely recognized.

There's nothing particularly dark in my past ... I live in the light. My disposition is basically happy. I have a good life.

It was the dawn of a new day that Birdie prized. It was God's little reminder that no matter how dark the night, the sun always rises.

Let's love our girls well and protect their spirits, Introduce them to their own strength and power, and Keep them as bright and beautiful as the day they were born.

He's dead, Annie. But as long as you haven't dealt with the memories of the things he has done to you, he'll live on. We'll always have to face these times when you think he's returned for you. You'll never be free." It

You didn't wind up on a pole without a lot of help from your family.

The human mind, with all its mystery, bears endless study. Doesn't it?

Grief is not linear. It's not a slow progression forward toward healing, it's a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones.

She knew him in a way that you can only know someone you love totally. Daily, she forgave his flaws, just as she knew he forgave hers. Maybe that alone was the foundation of a good marriage, an endless willingness to forgive and to love in spite of ourselves, an ability to ride the highs and endure the lows, the decision to always go home. She

You can cut the ties that bind but not without losing a part of yourself. You can walk away and hide from the people who made you, but you'll always hear them calling your name.

I love the way Beck loves. If everyone loved like she did, the world would be a better place.

In my research about the patient-therapist relationship, as well as the particular

Is the prey complicit in its own demise? Are we not seduced in some small way by the beauty, the grace, even the dangerous soul of the predator?

Emily looked into his eyes. They were blank, unreadable. That was the worst kind of person, the scariest - the one who'd learned to keep his feelings out of his eyes. Or who didn't feel anything at all. Emily had known people like that; they were the destroyers. They took things - everything you worked for, all your silly dreams - and smashed them beneath their boots for no reason at all.

Life is an impossible twist of choice and circumstance. One rarely exists without the other.

The United States is excellent at breeding psychopaths - a country where we reward the individual with a hyperfocus on success at any cost. We reward narcissism - with our social networks and hideous reality television programs. We

Every couple starts off loving each other, don't they? It's how a relationship ends that really defines its nature.

Ah, gym class. Remember it? Institutionally sanctioned torture for society's misfits.

When our actions and choices are based on fear and denial ... Well, nothing good can come of that. Ever.

Bored people looked for drama and caused trouble.

No one ever talks about issues like dissociative identity disorder, fugue, or psychotic breaks in anything but the most negative light. No one ever talks about how the personality does this type of thing to protect itself, to save itself, or how powerful and effective it is." I

Just because people treat you like shit, just because you may feel like shit sometimes, doesn't mean you are shit. You can make something of your life. You can give of yourself in this world to make it a better place. - Jake quoting his mentor, Arnie Coel

Hope is good. Without it, well, you do the math. But hope has to be like a prayer. Putting it out there to something more powerful than yourself.

It must be the ultimate punishment, don't you think, to finally gain wisdom, only to realize that the consequences of your actions are irrevocable?

Everyone always talks about how well mothers know their children. No one ever seems to notice how well children know their mothers.

Each of us extracted different people from our parents by our personalities and hence we had different experiences growing up.

I read 'Rebecca' when I was a teenager and was swept away by the powerful voice, the gut wrenching suspense and the dark, twisted love story at its center.

Love, a promise delivered already broken.

A child who's been injured by a parent waits her whole life for some acknowledgment of the wrong that's been done, some validation from him that her pain is real, that he's sorry and will make amends. The child will wait forever, unable to move forward, unable to forgive, without someone to acknowledge the past. In that powerlessness comes a terrible rage.

I don't believe in mistakes. Never have. I believe that there are a multitude of paths before us and it's just a matter of which way we walk home. I don't believe in regret. If you regret things about your life, than I'll bet that you're not paying attention. Regret is just imagining that you know what would have happened if you took that job in California or married your high-school sweetheart or just looked one more time before you stepped out into the street ... or didn't. But you don't know; you can't possibly know.

I didn't see the point of judging and analyzing a single moment in someone's life.

Didn't it seem like really thin, gorgeous people were always so mean? Where did they get that aura of entitlement? And didn't it seem like people always fawned over them even though they behaved badly? Why was that?

The business of writing a novel is a long, meandering road into the self, into the imagination. And it's a road the writer travels alone.

I don't remember a time when I didn't define myself as a writer.

She did love him, in that way that teenage girls love, like a lemming. Which is not love, of course.

Denial: my family heritage. If you don't ask the questions, the truth will never inconvenience you.

Wasn't there some belief about how if you drop a frog into boiling water, it will jump right out? But if you put it in cold water and turn up the heat gradually, it will allow itself to slowly cook to death?