Rebecca Serle Quotes

I had to dim my light. It was not an easy thing to be married to a celebrity. But it's also not an easy thing to be married to darkness. Eventually I dimmed so far I extinguished

There is a path of land that exists Beyond the sea and the sky. It is behind the mountains, Past even the hills - Those of luscious green that Roll up into the heavens. I have been there, with you. It is not big, although not too small. Perhaps you could perch a house on its width, But we have never considered it. What would be the use? We already live there. When the night closes And the city stills, I am there, with you. Our mouths laughing, our heads vacant Of all but what is. And what is? I ask. This, you say. You and I, here.

When I go to speak, I realize the entire apartment is filled with water and I'm choking on everything I cannot say.

No one ever died from having too much information. It's the misunderstandings that are the problem.

She finally understands what it means to fall into someone, that part of loving someone where you're totally consumed by them.

The unspoken motto of our house: If you stay closer to the ground, you have less distance to fall,

I'm trying hard to remain composed. His face slackens, smooths out, and I can't help but run my eyes over his cheeks, his ears, the freckle on his face. I think about how many times I've kissed that exact spot. When someone breaks up with you they should take their memories with them. It shouldn't be possible to remember someone when they're no longer there.

It feels impossible how much space there can be in this intimacy, how much privacy. And I think that maybe that is what love is. Not the absence of space but the acknowledgement of it, the thing that lives between the parts, the things that makes it possible not to be one, but to be different, to be two.

So you can't just blame the person who leaves. If two people are unhappy, clocking the person who actually walks out the door is just getting them on a technicality.

That's the thing about freewill: Every decision we make is a choice against something as much as it is for something else.

I love the order of deal making, the clarity oof language--how there is little room for interpretation and none for error. I love the black-and-white terms.

This is life. We have to take it as it comes, because even though some things are really shitty, there's a lot of really great stuff too.

I used to think that the present determined the future. That if I worked hard, and long, I'd get the things I wanted. The job, the apartment, the life. That the future was simply a mound of clay waiting to be told by the present, what form to take. But that isn't true. It can't be.

Life isn't meant to be believable. It's meant to be magical. Haven't you heard? Truth is stranger than fiction.

But it doesn't matter now. It's like an umbrella in the middle of a rainstorm after you're already wet. It's exactly what you need, what you want, but it's come too late.

It is not love, this feeling.
It is grief.

Worrying is wishing for what you don't want.

You needed the secret kept for you more than I needed the truth to come out.

[ ... ] you're willing to look past things and to give people second chances. But the thing is, Rose, some people don't deserve them.

You mistake love. You think it has to have a future in order to matter, but it doesn't. It's the only thing that does not need to become at all. It matters only insofar as it exists. Here. Now. Love doesn't require a future.

Look, you think I like history because I'm fascinated with the possibilities, with how it could have happened, but you're wrong. I like it because it's the one thing we actually know in life. The past is the only thing we can count on. The present? The future? They're anyone's guess.

Sometimes this happens without warning. Like the magnitude of the past - of all that has happened - creeps into the space and inflates. One minute it's this little thing - contained, pocket-size - the next minute it's a creature. With legs and arms and scales. That's how grief works. It's there even when you forget about it. It doesn't disappear, but just morphs, changes form.

Those are the things that define us. The way we love the people around us, and the choices we make to show it. That's what makes us who we are.

Running does all the things for me it does for everyone else - clears my head, gives me time to think, makes my body feel good and loose. But it also had the added benefit of taking me places. When I first moved to the city I could only afford to live in Hell's Kitchen, but I wanted to be everywhere. So I ran.

A kid zooms past us with a basketball, his mother sprinting after him. The city. Full and buzzy and unaware that somewhere, fifteen blocks south, tiny cells are multiplying in a plot to destroy the whole world.

Sometimes,' he starts, 'the hardest part about letting someone go is realizing you were never meant to have them.

He raises his glass, and I surprise myself by doing the same. Then he looks me square in the eye. There's a lot in that look. It's enticing, nerveracking. Like a roller coaster that you know is going to make your heart plummet down into your stomach, but it must be what you want, because you get on anyway.

This is life." he says. "We have to take it as it comes, because even though some things are really shitty, there's a lot of good stuff too.

How do you mourn something that never really belonged to you?

Habits make of tomorrow, yesterday.

Epic, epic love is not about having someone. It's about being willing to give them up. It's sacrifice. It's my mom's theater tickets stuffed down at the bottom of her jewelry box. It's Noah and August. It's my sister and Annabelle. It's Jordan and his mom, the truth he reserves to protect her. And see, that's the thing I didn't understand. The thing no one tells you. That just because you find love doesn't mean it's yours to keep. Love never belongs to you. It belongs to the universe.

Anyone can bend a judge's or jury's will with bravado, but to do it on paper--in black and white--that takes a particular kind of artistry. It's truth in poetry.

They died together; they'll always be remembered together. It's decided, once and for all. He was hers.

Consistent contentment rarely makes for good storytelling.

I've been working on my honesty this summer. I've told such a big lie, such a massively irreversible one, that I figure I need to somehow even the score. But the thing about lying is that it's not so easy to stop. Lies need one another, like a school of fish. If you start to separate them, they'll be killed off one by one. Sometimes the only way to keep lies alive is to tell more of them.

Happiness. The enemy of all suffering.

I look out on that view. The water, the bridge, the lights. Manhattan on the water, shimmering like a promise. I think about how much life the city holds, how much heartbreak, how much love. I think about everything I have lost there, this fading island before me.

I guess that's the thing about getting older. You realize your differences can be good things. Not just bad ones.

What if the greatest love story ever told was the wrong one?

There are a million things in this world that can end you, that can in one second obliterate the life you work so hard to keep alive. Our lives are structured around not dying. Eating, sleeping, looking both ways before you cross the street. It's all, all of it, to keep us safe from the thing that we know is going to get us anyway. It doesn't even make sense, if you think about it. It's the world's biggest joke. Our entire lives are set up around not dying, knowing all the while that it's the one thing we can't avoid.

People in relationships are either flowers or gardeners. Two flowers shouldn't partner; they need someone to support them, to help them grow. ..... There are flowers and gardeners. Flowers bloom; gardeners tend. Two flowers, no tending everything dies.

That's the thing about the places we come from - they probably say the least about who we really are than anything.

Sometimes I think that the only true way we can ever know a thing's value is by losing it.