You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir Quotes
"Living in this house is like living in a glass display case."
"Something had shifted, maybe just slightly, but perceptibly."
"A boat. I was on it with my husband, and later our daughter joined us, and still later, our son."
"There are stowaways in so many stories about long journeys across the sea."
"The night after I found the postcard and the notebook, I did it again."
"I can only imagine what the omniscient narrator would’ve said about that."
"My life is hard, and there is no pill to make a hard life easy."
"If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes."
"Narrative is an accumulation of knowledge about the future."
"I don’t keep a diary or journal, so if I want to remember the contours and textures of my daily life from a certain time, the easiest way back is to look at my social media."
"I can’t distill what I’m not permitted to fully experience."
"How do I distill the silence, the knowing that I don’t know?"
"Betrayal is neat because it preempts me from having to look, really look, at my marriage."
"It’s a mistake to think of one’s life as plot, but there’s foreshadowing everywhere."
"It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends."
"Life is short and the world is at least half terrible."
"When Violet was in preschool, building things with cardboard and string and glitter glue, she called her creations revengines."
"Who’s calling this laundry dirty, anyway? It’s just lived-in."
"I felt that he treated my (writing) work like an interruption of my (domestic) work."
"I was trying to see where the cracks in our life started."
"I worked quietly to fix it so no one would know it was—we were—broken."
"It was not a play, not a novel, not a film. It was—is—my life."
"Being the primary breadwinner is no more glamorous than being the primary caregiver."
"An invitation to give a reading or attend a conference meant I wouldn’t be available."
"Remember, I asked you to dog-ear this earlier: We became friends in a creative writing workshop."
"What would I have done to save my marriage? I would have abandoned myself, and I did, for a time."
"How can this story—this experience—be useful to anyone other than me?"
"To talk back to myself: experience is instructive."
"I need to trust that I can hand this to you, just as it is, and it will mean something to you."
"We hadn’t told them anything yet. Nothing."
"His narrative: We had gone to the beach with our kids, and I never played in the waves."
"In our next session, the marriage counselor prompted me to turn to my husband beside me on the couch and apologize."
"I taught myself to read his face and dim mine, a good mirror."
"We were hardly speaking at that point, except in therapy."
"I summoned my courage. 'Why has this been all about him? What about what I need to be happy?'"
"The best things to happen to me individually were the worst things to happen to my marriage."
"This isn’t about what happened but about what it means."
"I wasn’t depositing money in our savings account; I never even looked at it."
"I didn’t have a divorce lawyer. I didn’t know until that moment that I needed one."
"I remember thinking, then telling a friend: I want to cut a hole in the air and climb inside."
"I didn’t want to die, not really, but I wanted relief."
"It was October, and my husband was still living in our house."
"For the rest of the week, my husband and I were rarely together, and when we were, we spoke to the children instead of one another."
"I sat in the deck chair and sobbed, listening to the ocean waves."
"The thing about the ocean is I don’t feel safe in it."
"I wrote poems at the beach because I needed to make something more than sadness."
"The marriage counselor said, 'It isn’t about the waves.'"
"It was November when my husband moved out of our house."
"We were still living together, but we weren’t speaking."
"We were both busy, probably spread too thin, needing things from our lives—and from one another—that we weren’t getting."
"I disagreed that the something needed to be my work."
"I was sitting in a conference room just off the lobby, my lawyer across the table sliding me paperwork to sign."
"I could see my parked car through the large lobby windows, my children inside, playing games on their tablets."
"I was looking at another life. A blurred life I’m still trying to bring into focus."
"I saw our family home. I saw the house my children still draw in their pictures of home."
"Maybe this isn’t a note about plot at all. This isn’t about what happened but about what it means."
"One day, it hit me: The best things to happen to me individually were the worst things to happen to my marriage."
"I would have abandoned myself, and I did, for a time."
"I would have done it for longer if he’d let me."
"I am who I am, doing what I came to do."
"In Rothko’s painting, the bottom half of the canvas is gray and the top half is black."
"I have poems that have accrued over eight, nine, ten years."
"I think about the cost of that lemonade."
"This lemonade was not worth the lemons."
"We discovered the power of quick breaks—for a walk around the block with the dog, or Legos, or skateboarding for ten minutes before the next Zoom class."
"A memoir is about ‘the art of memory,’ and part of the art is in the curation."
"What now, Mom?" is what so many of us were hearing and feeling."
"Sometimes yes looks like reminding yourself of what is still possible."
"I’ve tried to love them as if there is a right way. No, I’ve loved them without having to try at all, because I’m their mother, and the love is not work."
"There are so many images I can’t access now, stories I can’t tell and retell, because the person who was there isn’t here."
"We are nesting dolls, carrying all of our earlier selves inside us."
"The thing about birds: If we knew nothing of jays or wrens or sparrows, we’d believe the trees were singing, as if each tree has its own song."
"The thing about this life: If we knew nothing of what was missing, what has been removed, it would look full and beautiful."
"There’s no joint custody for intangibles."
"I’m trying to serenity prayer the shit out of this time of my life."
"If life has taught me anything, it’s that anything’s possible."
"The only way I can live in this house is if it’s my house."
"We feel and feel, and live and live, but somehow we’re never full."
"I can’t imagine the children will want them. Why am I keeping those letters?"
"It’s okay to have feelings. You don’t have to laugh them off."
"The years since my marriage ended have felt like rapid-fire Q&A, light on the A."
"Inability to metabolize disappointment."
"What happens if you don’t process what has happened to you, what you’ve done, what you didn’t do? It sits inside you."
"Wish for more pain," a friend’s therapist advised, if you want to change."
"Memory itself is a kind of architecture." —Louise Bourgeois
"The way I’m telling you this story—these pieces, these strands, these echoes—is the story."
"I’ve become a student of my own pain, my own grief and suffering. In this way, he has been my teacher?"
"How do you heal when there is an open wound that is being kept open, a scab always being picked until it bleeds again?"
"It’s late but everything comes next." —Naomi Shihab Nye
"How long have I been wed to myself? Calling myself darling, dressing for my own pleasure, each morning choosing perfume to turn me on."