“Sometimes reality comes crashing down on you. Other times reality simply waits, patiently, for you to run out of the energy it takes to deny it.”
― The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
― The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
“Early on, the McIlvaines spoke to a therapist who warned them that each member of their family would grieve differently. Imagine that you’re all at the top of a mountain, she told them, but you all have broken bones, so you can’t help each other. You each have to find your own way down.”
― On Grief: Love, Loss, Memory
― On Grief: Love, Loss, Memory
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― The White Album
― The White Album
“The library belongs to everyone. The library, Janet used to say, is one of only a few places in the world that one doesn't need to believe anything or buy anything to come inside.”
― The Good Sister
― The Good Sister
“People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is 'you're safe with me'- that's intimacy.”
― The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
― The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Jessica’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Jessica’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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