J. Courtney Sullivan > Quotes

“Women leave their marriages when they can't take any more. Men leave when they find someone new.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“She thought about him all the time - not so much about Doug the individual, but rather about the nature of love, and the shock of learning how quickly it could disappear.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“We don't always do the things our parents want us to do, but it is their mistake if they can't find a way to love us anyway.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“She remembered how she had felt cleaning out her father's clothes, wanting at once to hold on to every dirty handkerchief and musty page of sheet much, and yet wishing she were anywhere else on earth, free of it all.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of making a woman's life everyone else's business--you have to dig out a little place that's only yours.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“She had once said that she believed the women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“These fucking women really piss me off,' April said. 'Because instead of being elated by the thought of making their own happiness and chasing some crazy dream, all they want to do is narrow their options and do something safe.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“The outside pressure to be married was intense. This had surprised her a decade ago, but now she thought she understood. People wanted you to validate their choices by doing the same thing they had done.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“There were so many ways to be twenty-six years old.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“When she was pregnant with Teddy, she feared that she’d give birth to a child who disliked reading. It would be like giving birth to a foreign species.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“If things had been different, she would be in Carolyn's place right now. She didn't want that sort of existence, but there was something so attractive about the security of feeling like you had stopped moving toward your life, and actually arrived.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“I think we're just different sorts of people, me and you. You're a planner. Everything has to be perfectly aligned before you make a move, or you're afraid the whole damn world will come crashing down. For me, it's more like, "We're having a baby. Now what?”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“You all seem to think you should marry someone when you feel this intense emotion, which you call love. And then you expect the love will fade over time, as life gets harder. When what you should do is find yourself a nice enough fellow and let real love develop over years and births and deaths and so on.”
― J Courtney Sullivan, Maine

“It was amazing that you did not become your grief entirely, and walk around leaking it everywhere. It could lie dormant inside you for days, weeks, years. You could seem a perfectly whole person to everyone you met. Without warning, grief might poke you in the ribs, punch you in the gut, knock the wind out of you. But even then, you seemed just fine. The world went on and on.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Saints for All Occasions

“All of it remained, a constant reminder: He existed, then he didn't. The world spins on, indifferent to the mess.”
― J Courtney Sullivan, Maine

“One of life's contradictions: how human beings were at once entirely resilient and impossibly fragile. One decision could stay with you forever, and yet you could live through almost anything.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Saints for All Occasions

“Kids are amazing. The first few months, they're just like these loaves of bread that shit. You're wondering what the hell you got yourself into. But then, they turn into people. It's the most incredible thing I've ever seen.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“...life was messy, conflict inevitable. It didn't mean you had to fall apart.”
― J Courtney Sullivan, Maine

“Once this kid came into the world, Sally knew, she would live in constant terror of somehow injuring or losing her. Having her tucked deep inside her belly was the safest she would ever feel about the child, and even that was scary.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“What would you have today if you woke up with only the things you thanked God for yesterday?” He wondered”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Saints for All Occasions

“Timing was everything when it came to being a woman—the moment you entered the world could seal your fate.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Maine

“All over the planet women were being tormented, yet if you took sexism seriously, you were a bore, an idiot, or a pain in the ass.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“A kid thinks her mother is just that -- hers. A mother is also a woman, an independent being, who doesn't want to be reminded by anyone, child or otherwise, of her tree-trunk thighs. The world made women's private lives a public affair to people who knew them and even people who didn't.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“Bree knew this habit of hers rankled Lara more than any other--her ability to make a decision and announce that there would be no further discussion was, in Lara's opinion, 'Cruel and selfish behavior, the type usually enacted by men with small penises.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“You could sell crack on the street and go to jail for decades. Or you could sell a woman, and be back out by morning.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“How could a person have and do all these stupid things--clip coupons and double lock the front door--and then one day just cease to exist?”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“April's just a Dixie cup of crazy. Lydia's more like a twenty-gallon tank”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“Your twenties are about getting the things you want—the career, the man. Your thirties are about figuring out what to do with that stuff once you’ve got it.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Friends and Strangers

“With the Smithies, it was different. There was sometimes no telling where one of them began and the others left off.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement