Afterlife Quotes
"Even creatures of habit can sometimes be forgetful."
"Today, like every other day, you wake up empty and frightened."
"The best thing you can give the people who love you is to take care of yourself so you don’t become a burden on them."
"We shall see, her mother used to say. Que será, será."
"Gratitude is hard to bear when you've done nothing to be thanked for."
"How does the imagination of the poor age? Perhaps from much practice over the course of a lifetime—always having to imagine a better life—it stays vigorous."
"The roots go deeper. Small sips, she reminds herself, and nods up at the gutter. Thank you for your help."
"The world is a crazy place. But she doesn’t need to be alerted each time a dragon comes close."
"This might give him the message that she is not available for further favors: making arrangements for the bus ticket, picking up Estela in Burlington, getting her some warm clothes."
"The best thing you can do for the people who love you is to usher them quickly through it."
"A dinner party you can leave early, but a friend at your door with a container of bean salad and a plate of brownies is harder to get rid of."
"She knows what her friend Vivian would do. Vivian supports worthy causes, just as she does her poor friends."
"Highly sensitive people need time and quiet as they are easily overwhelmed, especially when they are grieving."
"Thank God people can't see inside each other's heads."
"The first rule of sisterhood: Always act pleased to see them."
"We live in America, where you put your oxygen mask on first."
"The narrow path, the narrow path, she keeps pulling herself back."
"Never remain dry-eyed when a sister is crying."
"The truth is, to quote Tilly and their mother, the truth is there is no truth she can rely on at all."
"Every day is critical, as Private Eye Kempowski reminds them."
"To tell you the absolute truth, Kempowski says in a mournful tone—the absolute truth is that it’s the 10 percent I haven’t found who haunt me still."
"Better to note the sad, dreary things she wouldn’t want to share with anyone."
"Maybe Antonia herself will go missing, drive south until the hills turn emerald and the sky a tender blue that triggers wonder wonder wonder."
"Good thing about texting, simple, easily communicable, emoticon-friendly sentiments."
"Maybe the only difference between Antonia and the blithe partakers is that she recognizes what she is doing."
"More likely she will learn to live with a hole in her heart."
"The thin ice. Children skating on a pond at the edge of the woods."
"Desperate situations call for desperate moves."
"It irritates her, this moral profiling based on her ethnicity."
"Don’t parting lovers always arrange for their next rendezvous?"
"Strange bread people cast upon another’s needy waters."
"Dream on. Antonia laughs at her wishful thinking."
"You’re going to be all right, she reassures the girl."
"Objects in mirror are closer than they appear."
"In the midst of winter... an invincible summer. In a dark time, the eye begins to see."
"Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect, touch, and greet each other."
"Death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves."
"The time has come. Antonia pulls the worried girl to one side and slips an envelope into Estela’s hands."
"If I try to be like you, who will be like me?"
"It’s so much easier when someone just says no, n-o, instead of dragging you through all their considerations."
"Everyone has a story. Sometimes in asking for the best of each other, it’s best not to know it."
"These narratives are a kind of offering—to what god Antonia cannot guess."
"You’re all allowed to have your lives, but I’m not allowed to have mine."
"All you have to do is meet with this woman. A version of Izzy’s All it would take."
"The problem with having sisters who are therapists, is that you get all kinds of diagnoses thrown at you that you can’t defend yourself against."
"First, your own oxygen mask, then everyone else’s."
"What do you mean 'what for'? All this goddamn self-care?"
"How can it not be hers? I saw that baby come out of her!"
"We have to live as if, in other words, by metaphor."
"You’re not the only one with people who need you back home."
"Bless the spirit that makes these leaps, for truly we live in what we imagine."