Suzi Lambert

“Sarcastic people tend to be marshmallows underneath the armor, she once told me. I’m no different. The”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

“In the hearts of children, there’s so much trust and love. If only we could all cling throughout our lives to the wonder and innocence that are always present in a child. Our”
― Linda Thompson, A Little Thing Called Life: On Loving Elvis Presley, Bruce Jenner, and Songs in Between

“ALL THIS happened ten years ago. In the first few years after Hanna’s death, I was tormented by the old questions of whether I had denied and betrayed her, whether I owed her something, whether I was guilty for having loved her. Sometimes I asked myself if I was responsible for her death. And sometimes I was in a rage at her and at what she had done to me. Until finally the rage faded and the questions ceased to matter. Whatever I had done or not done, whatever she had done or not to me—it was the path my life had taken. Soon after her death, I decided to write the story of me and Hanna. Since then I’ve done it many times in my head, each time a little differently, each time with new images, and new strands of action and thought. Thus there are many different stories in addition to the one I have written. The guarantee that the written one is the right one lies in the fact that I wrote it and not the other versions. The written version wanted to be written, the many others did not. At first I wanted to write our story in order to be free of it. But the memories wouldn’t come back for that. Then I realized our story was slipping away from me and I wanted to recapture it by writing, but that didn’t coax up the memories either. For the last few years I’ve left our story alone. I’ve made peace with it. And it came back, detail by detail and in such a fully rounded fashion, with its own direction and its own sense of completion, that it no longer makes me sad. What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“But what gave rise to the swaggering self-righteousness I so often encountered among these students? How could one feel guilt and shame, and at the same time parade one’s self-righteousness?”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader