Vanishing Acts Quotes
"I was six years old the first time I disappeared."
"You can’t exist in this world without leaving a piece of yourself behind."
"I think it is a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is."
"People don’t vanish into thin air; that when you can’t find someone, it’s because you’ve been misdirected to look elsewhere."
"There were times I missed my mother desperately."
"It took me a lifetime to realize things don’t get lost if they don’t have value–you don’t miss what you don’t care about."
"That’s the strange thing about being a mother: Until you have a baby, you don’t even realize how much you were missing one."
"I wanted to be the kind of mother who couldn’t be separated from a child without putting up a fierce fight."
"Sometimes we find ourselves walking through our lives blindfolded."
"Sometimes, like now, they leave me restless in the middle of the night."
"Some lessons can’t be taught, they simply have to be learned."
"Human scents are like snowflakes–each one’s different."
"You can mask it; you can patch it smooth and clear; but you will always know what’s hidden underneath."
"When people we love make choices, we don’t always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same."
"It turns out that what’s important is not everything that you’ve accumulated all these years, but those few things you can carry with you."
"You can invent any fiction and call it a life."
"Sometimes, when you don’t ask questions, it’s not because you are afraid that someone will lie to your face. It’s because you’re afraid they’ll tell you the truth."
"How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering."
"You can boil your life down to a single suitcase, if you desperately have to."
"Sometimes being close to an issue is not a good thing for a writer. That sometimes it means you can’t see clearly."
"Freedom smells of spores and ragweed and dust and heat and suntan oil and car exhaust."
"I wonder if prison is any different from this."
"Then we do what we do best. Start over from scratch."
"I wish I could say am filled with confidence when I walk into that courtroom, but if I’m going to be honest, I don’t have a very good track record with success."
"There is a saying sometimes chanted at AA meetings: Fake it until you make it."
"Sir, you are out of order. Not only don’t I have this alleged pro hac vice motion, but I find it extremely disrespectful that you’ve come whooping into my courtroom and interfered with my proceedings."
"Sympathy, as any defense attorney knows, can be bought with a good lie."
"You can love a person and still hate the decisions they’ve made, can’t you?"
"What is a parent, really, but somebody who picks up the things a child leaves behind?"
"Sometimes knowing what’s right isn’t a rational decision, or even what works on paper."
"Love is not an equation, as your father once wanted me to believe. It’s the slate under the chalk and the ground buildings rise from and the oxygen in the air."
"Sometimes we don’t know we’re dreaming; we can’t even fathom that we’re asleep."
"Believe me, I have seen it all: from delicate boys with the faces of sprites who run from the teasing of bullies; to teens who climb to the top of water towers, intent on dying closer to Heaven."
"Sometimes leaving is the best course of action after all."
"When you love someone more than he loves you, you’ll do anything to switch the scales."
"You would think, when there is so much to say, that it comes easily. But instead we sit in an uncomfortable silence."
"Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness."
"When your mother is made out of dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you."
"Rabbit ran to a cottonwood, and a greasewood tree, but neither one would hide him–they were too afraid of being burned to a crisp."
"Sun isn’t the same, either," Ruthann says. "He makes himself so bright that no one can look at him long enough to shoot straight."
"It’s good to have a child to tell a story to."
"Before can find the appropriate response, Sophie comes out of the house, dragging a bucket of sand behind her. She pours it onto the fire, banking the embers, a small cloud of soot sighing up around her knees."
"Of course she can be good," Ruthann says. "Where I come from, on Second Mesa, our grandmothers give us our names, and our grandfathers give us our manners."
"I break out in a sweat, imagining already what it will be like to have a cup sitting on the table a few inches from me, steaming and fragrant."
"S13-417. Necessity defense. Conduct that would otherwise constitute an offense is justified if a reasonable person was compelled to engage in the proscribed conduct and the person had no reasonable alternative to avoid imminent public or private injury greater than the Injury that might reasonably result from the person’s own conduct."
"You cannot hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them."
"But hiding behind them are the other memories, the ones that peek out only when let down my guard: the hazy afternoon my mother and I sat with our heads bent over the sidewalk, watching ants construct a mobile city."
"Was having an occasional mother better than not having one at all?"
"If you ask me for five concrete recollections from when I was a kid, chances are that three of them will involve some fiasco based on my mother’s drinking."
"The relationship between a defendant and a lawyer is not all that different from the one between a child and an alcoholic parent."
"You’d accuse me of being prejudicial and sexist and outright anachronistic, wouldn’t you?"
"Of course not… their parents do." She winks at me.
"In jail, everyone comes with a label. It’s up to you to peel it off."
"Is Fate getting what you deserve, or deserving what you get?"
"Maybe Fate isn’t the pond you swim in but the fisherman floating on top of it, letting you run the line wild until you are weary enough to be reeled back in."
"The detention officer manning the visiting area at the jail nods at me. 'Take any empty one,' he says."
"Sometimes I think my whole life has been about holding on to you."
"Memories aren’t stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people."
"Sometimes we no longer fit the world we’ve been given."
"You cannot depend on an alcoholic, so you learn to live for the moments when they are present."
"Memories aren't just about the past. They're about what we choose to carry forward."
"I think the only way to get through this life is laughing hard and constantly, mostly at myself."
"Some people have a detailed history, others don't... At any moment, a person can start over."
"If you really want something to worry about, try figuring out who you’re going to be from now on."
"And you make it more complicated than it has to be."
"What if the whole kidnapping experience isn’t the story of Delia?"
"What if disappearing wasn’t the most cataclysmic event of your life?"
"I told Ruthann to go to hell," she says quietly. "But I’m glad you ignored me."
"For everyone who adores a happy ending, there’s someone else who cannot help but rubberneck at the accident on the side of the road."
"The challenge is figuring out which is which."
"Words, in spite of what you think, don’t always stay fixed."
"You have to find someone worthy of watching your back, even if making that pact means admitting that you are just as flawed as everyone else here."
"Once you make a mistake, can any amount of compensation erase it?"
"The people you love become ghosts inside of you, and like this you keep them alive."
"It’s always easier to judge someone than to figure out what might have pushed him to the point where he might do something illegal or morally reprehensible, because he honestly believes he’ll be better off."
"You have to mesh into a group to survive, even if you are surrounded by people who have cheated and stolen their way into position beside you."
"How can you believe someone who has built a life out of lying?"
"When you let people into the inner sanctum of your life, you risk having them see the heart of you."
"When you spend your life running by design, you may get far, but you rarely let yourself get close to anyone."
"I’ve had you, all I’ve ever wanted, but it has come at a price."
"I would tell them that they couldn’t possibly judge me any more harshly than I’ve judged myself."
"You become confident because someone beside you is unsure. You turn into the person others need you to be."
"Some choices are not made lightly. Not the ones Andrew made, not the ones the law makes, and, I hope, not your own."
"The amazing thing is, I could sit here for hours and still not run out of the best moments of my life."
"I wish I could tell you that I know you did the best you could, but I can't."
"Memories are like a still life painted by ten different student artists: no two held up side by side will ever quite match."
"I wanted you to be my mother. I wanted one so badly."
"The law is very deliberate, and it chooses its words carefully. And sometimes, on purpose, it opens the door for that gap between rule and reason."
"You have a choice to make, ladies and gentlemen. Some choices are not made lightly."
"I’m trying to find a back exit that we might use to escape when Delia appears and throws herself into my arms."