Amy Griffin > Quotes

“He was so forthright and so clear. I had never heard him share this truth publicly. I studied him, wondering why the party line had changed, and so dramatically. It was a reminder that multiple stories could be true at the same time, that we select our narratives in accordance with how honest we want to be and how honest we can be with ourselves.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“It was a reminder that multiple stories could be true at the same time, that we select our narratives in accordance with how honest we want to be and how honest we can be with ourselves.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“Memory is a sieve that catches only the most important moments. The insignificant details of daily life don’t stick; instead, they flow through the sieve. Then there are experiences that are unusual, set apart from the everyday, that carry an emotional charge. These we often hold on to, turning them over and over.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“We have to make the unconscious conscious, or it will direct our life and we will call it fate.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“There was an essential me that no abuse could ever harm. The me before I felt that I had to be perfect. The me before I felt shame. The me that wanted to be kind, not as a distraction of what was happening to me, but simply because it was the purest expression of love I knew. All of that was always within me. That was what I had to remember.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell: A Memoir

“Even if facing it is hard, it’s also so important. I thought of this as something I was running from. But in running from that, I was also running from the best things this life has to offer—freedom and happiness and real relationships with the people around me. You can’t have light without the darkness. You have to feel all of it in order to feel any of it.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“The day of the session, she sat across from me on the couch. “I’m hoping this brings you more resolution,” she said in her gentle, accented voice. “Remember to be compassionate with yourself. You don’t have to go in looking for anything. What you need to know, you’ll find.” I nodded. “One reason we do this work is so we can face whatever it is that we need to face,” she said. “So we can live with what we’ve been through, instead of living from it.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“It was like my body knew something that I didn’t.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“But I understood that it was only through the telling that I had set myself free.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“There is also, I’ve learned, a way that people sometimes respond when I tell them about my experience. They grow tight, zipped up, locked away. “I don’t think I could do anything like that,” they say. “I’m too much of a control freak. And besides, I don’t think I want to know. What if I don’t have the space for it? What if I find out something that I can’t deal with? I don’t have the time to process what comes up on the other end. Why would I want to wallow in the pain?” Or the line I hear the most: “If I don’t remember something, isn’t there a good reason for that?” In these comments, I hear the sound of their tell—the thing that nags at them with gnawed edges, the way it did at me for so long. Olivia laughed when I told her this. “You and I both know those are probably the people who need it the most,” she said. “Just like you did.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“That’s good,” she said. “You’re learning how to take up space—and not to judge yourself for it but to be kind with yourself instead.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“Did I enjoy it? I did, on some level, but I never let myself ask that question. Running was just something I had to do, something I had always done. People, sometimes in a vaguely accusatory way, would wonder aloud about my exercise habits. “Do you run so you can eat the chocolate cake?” a friend of a friend asked at a dinner party. She eyed the last bit of whipped cream on my fork as I set it down on my dessert plate. I felt exposed, even though she had misidentified my motivation. It wasn’t about the cake. I always ate the cake. I ran because I was afraid of what I would feel if I sat still.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our life and we will call it fate.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“Remembering was so hard, but now I understood why we did it—why it was worth remembering at all. It wasn’t so we could wallow in the pain. It was so we could more fully touch the joy.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“I was learning how to be self-sufficient, and in being self-sufficient, I would be safe.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“I dissociated because the pain was too great.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“My fear of slowing down long enough to listen to what my body might say.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“And yet it was John with whom I’d gotten so upset because his love made it safe for me to be angry. With all these other men, I couldn’t allow myself the indulgence of my rage. I had cosigned their bad behavior with my southern gentility for too long. Enough was enough. —”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“But recovery was an ocean, and I was learning how to swim.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“There was that word again—“perfect.” It was a word that held a lot of charge for me. For years, when someone described me or my life that way, I’d reject or deflect the characterization. “I don’t know what perfect even means,” I’d say. The word felt crass. I never wanted anyone to notice my quest for perfection or to call me out for it. I’d always try to be like a duck: seeming to glide across the water effortlessly but frantically paddling my feet beneath the surface in order to stay afloat. I’d worked so hard to keep everyone happy, to do right by everyone, to never let the ball drop. I was always the first to volunteer, the first to deny my own needs to ensure someone else’s comfort. But where had that gotten me? All that running had left me ragged—“nice but not real,” as Gigi had said. I didn’t want to model that for my daughters. I’d never want them to feel they couldn’t truly be themselves.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“Growing up in the South, you understand quickly the ocean that separates appearance and reality, particularly for women.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“So what are you going to do now?” she asked. “Well, I was working on pursuing legal action against the man who raped me,” I said. “But it turns out that I can’t. It’s very disappointing for me, because I wanted to be able to tell you that he could never hurt anyone else ever again. I wanted to tell you that I had solved the problem, that I’d taken care of it. But that’s not what happened.” “Oh, I didn’t mean like that,” Gigi said. “I mean, how are you going to get better?” I was caught off guard. “There’s so much I’ve been doing to heal,” I said. “Trying to slow down. Taking a bath every day. Feeling the sunlight on my face. Trying to notice things, even little things, like the colors of the leaves changing and the sound of them crunching under my feet. Have you noticed I’ve been going for a lot of walks lately?” “I think so,” she said. “And you’re not running anymore.” “That’s right,” I said. “I’m not.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“I understood, suddenly, that everything was connected. The choices I’d made in the life I’d built. The things I remembered and the things I could not bear to remember. In a flash, all the pieces snapped together, and not just the memories themselves but the significance of them; that is, why they mattered. It clicked into place, crisply, like parts that were designed to interlock. A jigsaw puzzle took shape over my head, an awareness fusing, the way people say something can suddenly dawn on you, as if I’d had the corner pieces assembled but not the full contents of the puzzle, and I had turned a little pile of cardboard fragments into a clear picture for the first time. Now it all made sense. I understood why there were things that I had remembered for so many years, that I had seen constantly, running on a track through my mind.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“You know when that thing happened with the milkman,” my mom said once, as we were walking through the redbrick streets of Amarillo. “My dad said, ‘Well, you were wearing short shorts.’ ” She shook her head. “We never talked about it. I just assumed it was my fault and tucked it away in a box somewhere.” “I’m so sorry, Mom,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault.” “Amy, do you ever wish you could put it all back in the box?” she asked. “That you could go back to before you knew all these horrible things?” I didn’t hesitate. “No,” I said. She looked at me, surprised by how emphatic I’d been. “I wouldn’t take any of it back,” I said. “Remembering is so much better than not remembering. Telling is so much better than not telling.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“Remembering is so much better than not remembering. Telling is so much better than not telling.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“I felt a new sense of freedom. But this freedom wasn’t what I’d felt as a little girl on my banana-seat bike; the definition had changed. Back then, freedom was a kind of abandon—wild, reckless, unselfconscious. Now I felt free when I could control every detail, from the temperature to the song on the stereo to where I would go next.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“How did I know that this was what I needed to do? Even now, I don’t really understand it. I just knew that I had built up walls, and I did not know how to tear them down. I knew that I was tired of running. And I knew that I could not hide in the vastness of the life I had built any longer—a life so big that I’d disappeared in it.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“My vulnerability was not a weakness. It was the greatest gift I could give them.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“Will I feel in control?” “This medicine allows you to recognize that you don’t need to be in control,” she said. It was golden hour, half her face bathed in sunlight. Her words sounded like poetry. “It’s a day with yourself—with the you that you’ve forgotten.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell

“When I was little, to tell on someone was a shameful thing: It made you a tattletale. It got somebody in trouble. In telling, you became the problem. Now I understand that the telling is the medicine—not the cause of shame but the thing that heals it.”
― Amy Griffin, The Tell