Somebody's Daughter Quotes
"Just remember, you can always come home."
"Take the time to feed yourself food that feels good and tastes good. Who better to do that for than you?"
"It wasn’t that we couldn’t take a hit, we just weren’t used to the pace, but we still believed we could figure it out."
"Panic radiates in the threads of my muscles, bangs in the back of my skull, twists my stomach, and sets my skin on fire. It doesn’t rise or fall. It spreads."
"I wanted to be able to talk to my mother the way I could with most other people, as myself."
"When I was four years old, I taught myself to lie awake until morning. I wanted the sunrise, and I only had to stay awake to have her."
"Sometimes I was bad and sometimes people were bad to me. Either way, the badness belonged where it landed."
"She hadn’t wanted to have another baby, not without being married. But abortion wasn’t an option, and he kept growing inside her."
"Kids can always tell the difference between adults who want to empower them, and adults who want to overpower them."
"What’s the point of living by everybody if you don’t want to see anybody?"
"How could she not believe her own baby?"
"I would die before I let anybody hurt my kids."
"If anybody ever tries anything with you, I will kill them."
"All that smiling will get you in trouble if the wrong person thinks it’s cute."
"Don’t. Ever. Give. A. Man. Your. Money."
"You’ll learn to gut a fish like a man. Then, you won’t need one."
"When it comes to family, all we have is each other."
"It is good. Do you know what happens at midnight?"
"We’re not going to stay here. We’re going somewhere else."
"You can’t upset your mother like that. She could lose the baby."
"You wrote a whole book. Don’t forget you did that."
"Is there a reason? Is something happening to you?"
"You almost didn’t get treated like somebody’s child."
"If he wants him to stop having a bottle at night, then he can come actually stay with his baby at night."
"I felt like my father would understand me, if I could just tell him what was happening inside me."
"She was not warm and endlessly loving as I imagined my father to be. She was real, and as real people often are, she was complicated."
"In the throes of my deepest anxiety, it’s her voice I hear warning me of Other People and what they might say."
Her fearful desire not to be "talked about" expressed itself as a constant monitoring of Other People’s behaviors and presentations of themselves.
"The stakes, she had impressed upon me, were too high for women to fall asleep at the wheel of our own potential."
"For maybe the first time, I told her I didn’t want to talk about my pain."
"I remember dressing rooms, attendants, accessories, and credit card offers."
"I wondered what they’d had to say or do to find themselves there and how many of those steps they wished they could take back."
"All my life, my father represented love to me. Deep, enduring, irrevocable love."
"School felt like practice for white collar prison, and I couldn’t really pretend to care as much as it would take to make everybody happy."
"I tried not to think about what might be happening back in my mother’s home."
I told Brett first. "I knew it," he said. I could hear him smiling.
"I wasn’t sure how hard I was supposed to try to develop skills I saw as hopeless."
"I knew she missed me. I thought that was the only reason we were getting along."
My mother didn’t let me go. She whispered in my ear, "I knew it. I knew you could do it."
"I watched him piling food on the Styrofoam, and wondered when it would be enough."
"Brett loved me. He was right though, there was more to it than that."
"The hands of a musician move over anything they love like an instrument."
"I was alone in a college town, managing and caring for myself with limited guidance."
"My love for my family was in direct conflict with my need to be gone, out, and away."
"I had no idea what life would look like without him, and I tried to picture it."
"I did not find ease, but I did find temporary moments of peace."
"I fell into my junior year of college. My life was happening with my hands on the steering wheel."
"When you don’t grow up with a certain kind of affection, even if you know you’re worthy of it, it can be hard to accept in adulthood."
"The oldest letter I had from my father was dated in 1991."
"I hoped he would look past it, that he could look past it."
"I wasn’t sure if this was true, but I hoped."
"If you brought a treat into the house, you’d better hide it, or he would find it and eat it without remorse."
"There are miles between running out of things to say, and running out of the strength to say them."
"It’s going to be good. You’ve waited a long time for this. Tell him I said hello."
"I did not know that there are miles between running out of things to say, and running out of the strength to say them."
"You need to do what it feels right to do, and you can’t let anybody stop you."
"You are ready. You have to be, and you are."
"This was my father, and I was his daughter. That was a good place to start."