Karen Nelson

“Even when one is no longer attached to things, it's still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn't grasp...' There are the places in memory you do not wish to go with others.”
― Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

“When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn’t quite fill it in.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“Thinking about the past impeded my efforts to be decent in the present.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Because the truth is, the world will probably whittle your daughter down. But a mother never should.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings