Catherine Newman > Quotes

“Maybe grief is love imploding. Or maybe it’s love expanding. I don’t know. I just know you can’t create loss to preempt loss because it doesn’t work that way. So you might as well love as much as you can. And as recklessly. Like it’s your last resort, because it is.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“And this may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel. To say, Same. To say, I understand how hard it is to be a parent, a kid. To say, Your shell stank and you’re sad. I’ve been there.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Everyone dies, and yet it’s unendurable. There is so much love inside of us. How do we become worthy of it? And, then, where does it go? A worldwide crescendo of grief, sustained day after day, and only one tiny note of it is mine.”
― Catherine Newman, We All Want Impossible Things

“Mom, try not to hurt your own feelings for no reason,” Willa says. This is sensible advice.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“People who insist that you should be grateful instead of complaining? They maybe don’t understand how much gratitude one might feel about the opportunity to complain.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Despair laced through with so much incredible beauty. We just keep showing up for each other. Even through the mystery of other people’s grief. What else is there?”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Who wants a guy to last longer? Finish up is my feeling. My library book’s not going to read itself!”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“I’ve heard grief described as love with nowhere to go.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Why do we love everyone so recklessly and then break our own hearts? And they don’t even break. They just swell, impossibly, with more love.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“We're just ruined by sex, women---our bodies, our psyches. We're sexually assaulted every five minutes. We're infected with everything. Traumatized by conceiving, by not conceiving. But let's keep at it? Like, you've been in a maiming car accident and then you're supposed to want to get back in the car? I mean, what?”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Life is messy. I certainly don’t expect tidiness from yours or anybody else’s.”
― Catherine Newman, We All Want Impossible Things

“One thing I’ve started to suspect about myself is that I’m some kind of confusingly extroverted introvert. I just want to sit here on the couch with a tumblerful of the good booze Alice brought, soak in the music and the conversation, and not talk to anyone. I want to be invisible and lie down on the couch and fall asleep to the muffled sounds of conversation, like a child in the back seat of the car being driven safely through the night by grown-ups who love her.”
― Catherine Newman, We All Want Impossible Things

“Willa once shared her theory that finding a four-leaf clover was a symptom of luck, not a cause. “It just means you have the kind of life where there are growing things and you have time to look at them,” she said. I think she was actually making a point about class privilege? But I like to imagine that luck is everywhere, even before you find it.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Life is a seesaw, and I am standing dead center, still and balanced: living kids on one side, living parents on the other. Nicky here with me at the fulcrum. Don’t move a muscle, I think. But I will, of course. You have to.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“She waited to die until I left the room, which is a thing I’ve heard parents do. I can imagine it. I mean, you’re never done being somebody’s mom, ever, are you? She took care of me until the very end.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Grief is like the sound of the exhaust fan over the stove—a constant hum that recedes a little to the background over time, though you never get to turn it off.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“often an empty nest is two birds looking at each other, shell-shocked and nostalgic, over the single worm they’re now splitting for dinner, discussing what to do with the worm leftovers.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“It’s almost painful, the way little children just trustingly hold out their hearts for you to look at—the way they haven’t learned yet how to conceal what matters to them, even if it’s just chewing gum or a plush dolphin or plastic binoculars.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“what she told me was that I didn’t need to draw so many conclusions, to make so many decisions. That I could just live with all the different parts of a life as they were. That I could be happy even though nothing would ever be perfect.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“How alive your heart to feel such sorrow!”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“This is how it is to love somebody. You tell them the truth. You lie a little. And sometimes you don’t say anything at all.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“What I’m starting to understand, finally, is that the point isn’t to help the people who know how best to ask for help. It’s to be helpful.”
― Catherine Newman, We All Want Impossible Things

“Don’t placate me,” I say quietly. “It’s not okay. Jesus fucking Christ. I’m right to be mad!” Am I, though? I fucking am! “It’s so annoying the way women have to do all the hard things and take care of everybody and pay attention to everything all the time. And then be soft and open and fuckable. It’s infuriating!”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“But grief was like a silver locket with two faces in it. I didn’t know what the faces looked like, but it was heavy around my neck, and I never took it off.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“I mean you're never done being somebody's mom, ever, are you?”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“There are wounds that never really heal, no matter how much time they take.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“I try to stay vigilant because everybody's health and safety depends on it, and also, if I relax now I will fall asleep for the entire rest of my life and wake up dead.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Life is a near-death experience. And death is a real-life one.
You just want to wake up while you still can. While the world is turning and the owls are calling and gratitude is the very air you are still breathing, because, whatever happens next, that's how lucky you are.
You are still breathing.”
― Catherine Newman, Wreck

“Here’s the thing about menopause, though, that I don’t entirely understand. We’ll exchange a few words like this? A seemingly slight disagreement? Only then rage fizzes up inside my rib cage. It burns and unspools, as berserk and sulfuric as those black-snake fireworks from childhood: one tiny pellet, with seemingly infinite potential to create dark matter—dark matter that’s kind of like a magic serpent and kind of like a giant ash turd. “Why do I have to be in charge of every single thing?” I hiss.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Menopause feels like a slow leak: thoughts leaking out of your head; flesh leaking out of your skin; fluid leaking out of your joints. You need a lube job, is how you feel. Bodywork. Whatever you need, it sounds like a mechanic might be required, since something is seriously amiss with your head gasket.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich