Jan Ellison > Quotes

“Denial, as any addict in recovery will tell you, is not defined as knowing something and pretending you don’t; it is failing to see it at all.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“I suppose unrequited love is the hardest kind to shed because it is not really love at all. It is a half-love, and we are forever stomping around trying to get hold of the other half.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“It was so undignified and unnecessary, the way married people behaved. The indiscriminate airing of grievances, the incessant flinging of blame and complaint. Of course, I had no idea back then what a marriage required. How the resentments and oversights and misunderstandings could pile up, sometimes moving ordinary kindness beyond reach. Love piled up, too, if you were lucky, but it seemed to be locked away in a separate compartment, sometimes unreachable when it was needed most.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“Perhaps blame is the way the universe organizes itself around tragedy and loss. Without blame, suffering is random, and that kind of randomness leads to madness.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“I told him because I wanted what everybody wants—to be known. To know oneself, and to tell the whole story of that self, and to be loved anyway.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“Stories don't like to end when you want them to, do they? Loose ends aren't easy to snip with scissors or tuck inside a hem. They tempt you. They want you to keep pulling until there is nothing left to keep you warm.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“Not a day or an hour and sometimes not even a moment in advance did I have any idea what Patrick had in mind for me, or whether he had me in mind at all. This uncertainty lay like a sore under the surface of my skin, erupting again and again, then subsiding, but never healing.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“All of it was rushing together, making a psychedelic mess of my heart.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“If, when I looked, I was not perfect, how could I be beautiful? And if I was not beautiful, how could I be loved? I was not the only woman who ran that script.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“They say people who are bipolar see colors differently when in a manic state. What did Emme see when I showed her the photo a few days later?”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“we can achieve happiness not by remaking ourselves, but by subverting unhappiness.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“We are only flesh and blood. We are only chemicals mixing and circuits firing, sometimes in disarray. We are, every last one of us, plagued by useless want.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“Unrequited love is the best kind of all. But I can tell you with certainty, Robbie, that the other kind of love, the kind I received from your father for more than two decades, is far more necessary.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“It seems to me now that what I wanted when I set off for Europe was not so much adventure as deliverance.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“The heart is large, and there is more than one material in the bucket we call love.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“What happens to a marriage? A persistent failure of kindness, triggered at first, at least in my case, by the inequities of raising children, the sacrifices that take a woman by surprise and that she expects to be matched by her mate but that biology ensures cannot be. Anything could set me off. Any innocuous habit or slight or oversight. The way your father left the lights of the house blazing, day and night. The way he could become so distracted at work that sometimes when I called, he’d put me on hold and forget me, only remembering again when I’d hung up and called back. The way he wore his pain so privately, whistling around the house after we’d had a spat, pretending nonchalance, protecting you and your sisters from discord, hiding behind his good nature, inadvertently”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“After all, experiencing something is not the same as remembering it. A memory is by its nature a revision.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“It was possible to rush forward, looking back, and break your neck.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“He had a strange way of talking, his head tucked into his neck and his eyes fixed in the empty space beyond, as if something were suspended there, ripe fruit or a glimmer of light, as if he were not quite brave enough, or perhaps too polite, to look a person in the eye.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“I suppose that unrequited love is the hardest kind to shed because it is not really love at all. It is a half-love, and we are forever stomping around trying to get ahold of the other half.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“unrequited love is the best kind. But I can tell you with certainty, Robbie, that the other kind of love, the kind I received from your father for more than two decades, is far more necessary.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“I wondered why I had been so set on tall men. There were only three inches of height separating this man and me—if I turned around we would be almost eye to eye—and yet that felt exactly right. He”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“being born with only one kidney, occurring in roughly one in two thousand people.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“Want like a small dirty creature, waiting all the years of her marriage for a sign. Patrick was not the sign; she herself was, her own blue dress, her tiny waist, her small, round breasts. And her want was not for dogged faithfulness—and not even for love—but for unfamiliar flesh, for bone against her own bone. T”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“I wanted that whole society frozen in revelry, and I wanted my feelings frozen, too. My life and all the things that had happened or might happen to me seemed distilled and poignant, and the evenings themselves timeless and meaningful. I was no longer self-conscious or afraid. I could say anything, and often did.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“Children will end up a world away, whether you want them to or not—unaware of the havoc being wreaked upon their histories back home.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“Watching you together—your hair and eyes, your flesh and bone, your three bodies so frank and solid in the world—gave me immeasurable pleasure. It was pleasure derived not from parental pride, but from gratitude. We had been blessed by the existence on this earth of our three particular children, and we had been assigned a blessed task in keeping you all safe in the world.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“fucking parking spot.” The woman hauled herself out of the front seat. Her face wrinkled with the effort and her small, old eyes leaked and blinked in the sun. Your father took a step back. He stood for a moment, shoved his hands in his pockets, and crossed the parking lot toward me, the rage fading and his face becoming again the mask it had been since I’d returned from London and, four days before, made my foolish confession—a mask I no longer had a right to question or remove. We exited the structure and pulled into a handicapped spot in front of the emergency room entrance and ran. I held my sunglasses in my left hand and clutched my purse with my right. I had forgotten my sweater. Your father flung his windbreaker over his shoulder and the zipper stung my cheek, the beginnings of retribution, perhaps, for a past that had long ago laid down the invisible blueprint of our future.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“first sight of him at the bar, the shock of him under my ribs.”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion

“People say a mother is only as happy as her least happy child. But what if the state of that child's happiness has become a mystery? What if that child is no longer a child but a young man who has removed himself to a great distance and encased himself in silence?”
― Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion