Kerry Fisher > Quotes

“And then I left the room.
Very late in life, I was starting to learn that walking away instead of engaging in increasingly angry debates was the key to greater happiness and lower blood pressure.”
― Kerry Fisher, The Secret Child

“Recently I’d begun to appreciate the advantages of being single.
-Grace”
― Kerry Fisher, The Secret Child

“Maybe hands were like memory foam mattresses, carrying the imprint of people they’ve loved forever.”
― Kerry Fisher, The Island Escape

“There were more good people in the world than bad and the best one of them all was standing right in front of me.”
― Kerry Fisher, The Secret Child

“For once in my life, I wanted to surrender to romance, to believe love was sparkly and special and not something that made you look in the mirror and shake your head at your own stupidity.”
― Kerry Fisher, The Silent Wife

“How many people in the world missed great chunks of time with people they loved, time they could never get back, through a comment taken the wrong way or a misplaced reaction, which pride or fear of rejection exacerbated, spreading like ivy, covering all the paths back, all the avenues of apology, until the only way forward was alone?”
― Kerry Fisher, The Secret Child

“Realised what a privilege it was to be at home with my kids and how quickly it would go and how much I’d wish I could turn the clock back and do it better, with more grace and patience. Instead of feeling I’d lost out, robbed of a university education, the opportunity to try out in the world of work, seeing if I could cut it, if I was smart enough to make my mark.”
― Kerry Fisher, The Woman I Was Before

“There it was. The one syllable that defined and exasperated me. The word that made me who I was, even when I didn’t want to be, even when the demands of the role were too many, too painful, too bloody hard. The title that meant I could never be free again. Nor would I want to be.”
― Kerry Fisher, The Woman I Was Before

“How many events of my childhood, of my adulthood, would now change shape, stretching into a different truth entirely, the razor-sharp edges of bitterness rounding out into something softer and more forgiving? If there was a word in English to sum up the concept of understanding a difficult family member now you knew their secrets and wishing you’d been a bit kinder, today was a day when it would have come in handy.”
― Kerry Fisher, The Secret Child

“Birthday presents terrify me”
― Kerry Fisher, After the Lie

“Maybe, one day, this would be the best thing that ever happened to me.”
― Kerry Fisher, The Woman I Was Before

“My heart accepted her hurt, tucking it into that place within us where someone else’s pain crosses the threshold into our own world and lives there so boldly that it defines us nearly as acutely as it defines them.”
― Kerry Fisher, The Woman I Was Before

“it is possible that other people have some good ideas and that allowing someone else to help you doesn’t make you weak, pathetic or ridiculous. It makes you someone who is strong but who needs a bit of support now and again. Like all of us.”
― Kerry Fisher, The Woman I Was Before

“My wedding day took place on a non-descript afternoon in the middle of January, well away from any big deal occasions like Christmas or Valentine’s Day. I was thirty-five and I’d never even lived with a man before. Not because I was the last nun in the convent – too late to pull that stunt with my ten-year-old son, Sam, in tow – but because I was addicted to wrong ’uns. The sort of men who would have dads bundling their daughters into basements and throwing burning oil out of the top window. But”
― Kerry Fisher, The Silent Wife

“Make the most of it. Enjoy them thinking you are wonderful and never wanting to spend a single moment away from you.”
― Kerry Fisher, The Secret Child

“But after years of Dad saying, ‘Fear keeps you safe, darling, because, as we know, the worst can happen,”
― Kerry Fisher, The Silent Wife

“I’d always said jokingly that low expectations were the key to greater happiness,”
― Kerry Fisher, The Woman I Was Before

“Not many in the As. A few more in the Bs. And then my eyes fell on Jean Blacklock. Of course, Blacklock. Dad and his bloody Whitelock.”
― Kerry Fisher

“No one ever lay on their deathbed wishing they’d spent more time in the office.”
― Kerry Fisher, The Woman I Was Before

“The pointlessness of motherhood. I’d spent all that time saying, ‘Look both ways’, ‘Don’t go off with anyone’ and ‘Here’s a Haliborange and Omega-3’ and all that my kids would remember about me was my ability to ruin their lives.”
― Kerry Fisher, After the Lie

“I heard someone say once that many of us only seem able to find heaven by backing away from hell. And while the place that I’ve arrived at in my life may not precisely be everyone’s idea of heavenly, I could swear sometimes — I hear angels sing.”
― Kerry Fisher

“Love is most of all the feeling that these are the people you are meant to be with. #FoundMyTribe.”
― Kerry Fisher, The Woman I Was Before

“I felt sick with guilt. The pain of giving one child away and the one who followed rarely missing the opportunity to say, ‘I wish you weren’t my mother.’ How I must have hurt her."
-Grace, The Secret Child”
― Kerry Fisher, The Secret Child

“The belonging to someone without having to try, that glorious freedom to be any old self, knowing that who you really were would never stop the other person loving you, never make them leave you.”
― Kerry Fisher, The Woman I Was Before

“I hoped she had died in the library with all her books soothing her to sleep. I”
― Kerry Fisher, The Not So Perfect Mother

“England”
― Kerry Fisher, The Rome Apartment

“my own all day long. Just as all the other boys joined in the wheelbarrowing – a chaotic tangle of shrieks and skinny limbs – the mayhem came to a halt. Massimo strode down the garden, dressed in a proper goalkeeping outfit, clapping his hands and barking out an authoritative, ‘Right, gather round.’ I’d been trying to get their attention for the last half an hour. It was still a man’s world. But right now, I was glad this particular man with his child-taming abilities was here. He ran through the rules of the splash and score game involving transferring water from one dustbin to another before shooting at the goal. ‘Two teams, you’re the goalie for that one, Nico; I’ll be the other.’ Not for Massimo the ‘Ready, Steady, Go, let’s all enjoy ourselves’ approach. Oh no. He blew a whistle and launched into a stream of team encouragement that made me feel as though he was trying to cheer an Olympic marathon runner to the finish line rather than a gaggle”
― Kerry Fisher, The Silent Wife

“I’d resolved to instruct Sam to donate my body to medical science and to celebrate random memories of me as they popped up without the stress of a big gloomy date rolling round every year.”
― Kerry Fisher, The Silent Wife

“youth is a time for fitting in with everyone else but middle age is the time to stand up and say, ‘This is who I am, stay for the whole show or leave the auditorium.”
― Kerry Fisher, Secrets at the Rome Apartment

“plucking up the courage and sitting down”
― Kerry Fisher, The Secret Child